‘Well, if you won’t, you won’t!’ he continued. ‘I don’t want to bother you.’ And Pierston went away.
He was stopping to look at the old-fashioned flowers under the garden walls when he heard a voice behind him.
‘Mr. Pierston—I wasn’t angry with you. When you were gone I thought—you might mistake me, and I felt I could do no less than come and assure you of my friendship still.’
Turning he saw the blushing Avice immediately behind him.
‘You are a good, dear girl!’ said he, and, seizing her hand, set upon her cheek the kind of kiss that should have been the response to hers on the day of his coming.
‘Darling Avice, forgive me for the slight that day! Say you do. Come, now! And then I’ll say to you what I have never said to any other woman, living or dead: “Will you have me as your husband?”’
‘Ah!—mother says I am only one of many!’
‘You are not, dear. You knew me when I was young, and others didn’t.’
Somehow or other her objections were got over, and though she did not give an immediate assent, she agreed to meet him later in the afternoon, when she walked with him to the southern point of the island called the Beal, or, by strangers, the Bill, pausing over the treacherous cavern known as Cave Hole, into which the sea roared and splashed now as it had done when they visited it together as children. To steady herself while looking in he offered her his arm, and she took it, for the first time as a woman, for the hundredth time as his companion.
They rambled on to the lighthouse, where they would have lingered longer if Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite poetry from a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the village commanding the entrance to the island—the village that has now advanced to be a town.