"But, John, my nerves are a woman's, remember, and you mustn't keep them a-strain so long; they're wery much weakened by all this."
"Ay, to be sure," says John; "your nerves be a woman's, to say nothin' of your curosity bein' a woman's!"
And he laughed with as much heartiness at her expense as though she had been his wife already.
"John!" This with tender reproach, and he resumed, in a tone of respectful and lover-like humility.
"Wa'n't your name Rose Rollins afore you was jined to the vagabond,—wagabond, that is to say,—afore you was dethroned; and didn't you live in Fust Street, opposite them old tenement housen knowed as Baker's Row?"
"Of course I did, John, in the yaller brick with the shop in the corner, and the entrance embellished with a beautiful sign,—three coffins, with their leds turned back so as to reweal the satin linin's, and my father's name in letters that represented silver screws! A stroke of genius that design was!—the sign of the three coffins, two of them sideways and one end; my father's name—Farewell Rollins, wery appropriate to his business as it turned out—in letters that they was modelled after silver screws."
"Three on 'em, two sideways and one end?" says John; "and the name, Farewell Rollins, shaped arter silver screws! Why, as you be a livin' cretur, you're the very—wery—little gal I was in love with; and many a day, dark enough otherwise with poverty and sorrer, you've lighted up with your purty golden head!" And then he tells her, by way of illustrating the depth and sincerity of his early attachment, that it once happened to him to have an orange given him at Christmas time; and that, although he had never tasted an orange in all his born days, except through a confectioner's window-glass, he without hesitation tossed it over the wall into her father's yard, hoping that she, who ate oranges every day, might possibly have his added to the rest. And he concluded with, "Such was the nater of my feelin's for you even then."
"And the nater of your feelin's, John, was not only wergin' close upon the feelin's of love," says the milliner, deeply touched, "but they was love,—love of the wiolentest kind!"
And then she says that, if she can only find in the town an orange as big as the full moon, she'll buy it, let it cost what it will, and give it to him.
And then she says, playfully tapping his chin, "I only wish them feelin's had hild."