“I think so. Yes, Doromea said you were a literary Roycrofter—that is an epigram, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so—or a Mission-made metaphor. I wish”—Timothy’s voice grew wistful—“she had said she hated me.”
“Said she hated you? Oh! I see”—Anne remembered—“you want her to be in love with you.”
“She is in love with me,” admitted Timothy, modestly. “Only she thinks it’s beneath her—being in love at all, I mean. She thinks it isn’t subtle.”
“I suppose it isn’t,” Anne meditated, allowing the horse to walk in zigzag laziness across the road and back. “That must be why I don’t mind it,” she decided, as they came in sight of the house. “I’ve been in love ever since Michael asked me to try to be—and a long time before that.”
Timothy looked at her again more closely. “Michael should write better books,” he murmured, getting down to open the gate.
“So you really didn’t mind our not meeting you?” Doromea’s anxiety was most appealingly clothed in a rose-sprigged frock. “You see, Anne offered, so we thought——”
“You thought you couldn’t be more gracious to me,” finished Timothy, glad that Doromea’s hair curled over the ears as unsubtly as ever. “By the way, where is Anne?” He looked about the wide homely porch, where a work-bag and a tennis racquet spoke of some one, evidently just a plain woman.
“She is getting dinner.” Doromea shifted uncomfortably to another chair. “I wish I could help her, but I can’t even boil an egg—and not have it crack! Anne is so practical.”
“And so impractical,” appended Michael. “Fancy letting Gladys-Marie go to the city when Timothy was coming! And of course there was no one by whom to send the manuscript, once we had finished it. Anne had gone over to read to Aunt Hester, and Doromea hadn’t the least idea how to hitch up.”