“Did my mother tell you my plans for making over the mill and what I’m doing for Beany since—” he lifted a hand to his bandaged head—“the slight concussion of what we doubted very much was there?”
She nodded, “Yes; she told me. And I want to tell you—I was going to write you—I want to take back—” she came to a standstill, her eyes on the floor.
“I don’t know what you can take back,” said Peter Parker gravely. “You’ve never given me anything except hating and despising and——”
“It’s that I want to take back. I want to tell you that it wasn’t true, what I said about you in The Torch,” the doctor’s daughter told him very low, “and that I know it wasn’t true, and that—I’m sorry.”
“Then it isn’t because you still despise me?”
“No; oh, no!”
He put his hand on the neat bandage again. “I can’t exactly remember which I’ve actually said, and which I’ve only dreamed of saying, and planned to say,” he fretted. “So, even at the risk of repeating myself, of boring you, I think I’d better tell you—do you mind if I sit down?”
“Oh, please!”
“Thank you.” He looked younger than ever, leaning back in Miss Ada’s own dear father’s stately chair. “I just want you to know, you see, in case I have not mentioned it to you before, that I think your hair is like a burnished copper shield ... and a sunset—not a pinky, pale, insipid sunset but a splendid, stormy, gorgeous one, and like a flame, and that flame is searing me and scorching me and devouring me, and I want it to! I love you so much that I’ll do anything you wish—and be anything you wish. I’ll take you over the world, or I’ll let you stay here. You can build model mills—” he frowned, and getting unsteadily to his feet walked to the Persian rug and stood upon it. “I wish somebody would make a good job of blowing up the Altonia or burning it down, so I could start in and prove to you——”
“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” said Glen Darrow very low, “because I believe—everything. Oh, why didn’t your mother make you understand? I am going to marry Luke Manders the day I am twenty years old. I promised my father, when he was dying, and now—” she crimsoned suddenly. “I know what you think—what you must think of him. Of course,” in spite of her, there was a faint curl of the lip, “he said he was only going to get the doors open to get the hands out——”