"Oh, John, how could you?" breathed the girl; "how dare you speak so? You haven't asked me yet."
"We will be married, Aunt Clara, and, please God, one month from today."
"Oh, you John! What impudence! Aunt Clara, did you ever see anything like it? Here he has never courted me one bit in his life, and never even asked me to marry him, and now he takes the law into his own hands in that way!"
John drew her closer to his side, with his encircling arm, and looking down into her eyes, he said:
"Dear girl, I have been courting you in spirit all my life. Let me have my own way now, will you not?"
His tone was so gentle, so tender, that she answered softly, yet still half-mischievously:
"Well, Aunt Clara, I guess we will have to let him have his way. He is so big that he could crush us both if we didn't please him."
Aunt Clara's eyes were moist with tears, as she watched them. She rejoiced in their love, and she was content that she had helped a little. But as they started out of the door to leave her, and Diantha came back to kiss her once more in token of love and gratitude, Aunt Clara's heart flew back to their lost Ellie, and all the sad, miserable story. She went to the door and watched them go out of the gate, Diantha still full of bubbling mischief, with her quick, pretty gestures of teasing indifference as she refused even to take John's arm in the bright moonlight—it all brought back her Ellie's love for this same good man, and she turned back into her room with sobs in her throat; and then she knelt in silent prayer for these two who had gone out from her home to their blessed future.
As Diantha Winthrop herself knelt that night in her evening prayer, she poured out the wealth of her young heart in gratitude to God who had so magnified her life and its mission. After her prayer, she sat at her window and thought back on all the past, and she wondered anew that she could ever have called her lover cold, reserved or silent. His every look was pregnant with thought, and his presence was full of unspoken meanings. She could see how in her ignorant, thoughtless girlhood she could not appreciate him, as she could not appreciate the deep throbbing poems in the Bible until life opened them and sorrow put into her hand the secret key to their mysteries.
She had grown up to John now, and she wondered how it was that she could ever have permitted ordinary men to come near her. He was a king! Proud, intelligent, pure! With the wide-open eyes of experience, she recognized his matchless manhood and bowed down in mighty prayer that she might prove worthy of his love.