"Better wait till she says 'yes'," Mrs. Farrell had advised, as she prepared to 'hang up', "before you start counting your chickens. She may not care to take a chance on you. I know how I'd feel about it, if it was me. However, I'll do my best for you."
Jimmy, who was quite ready to admit any time that he was "no hand with girls," shoved his hat to one side, thrust his hands into his pockets, and spat aside as, waiting outside the Harrison gate, he saw Daisy approach along the gravel walk.
If he had come for her in the jitney, as usual, to take her for a companionable hour's ride up and down his round, as a "free" and welcome passenger, he would have felt at ease; for he had become used to that. But this waiting, with no friendly engine pounding away in front of him and no familiar steering-wheel to lean his hands upon, was enough out of the ordinary to have embarrassed Jimmy anyway, even without the mental consciousness of his deep-laid matrimonial plot, and the feeling he could not shake off that somehow Daisy might sense it prematurely and flee.
"'Lo, stranger," said Daisy, softly, taking the words out of Jimmy's mouth, as it were. She was a little shy, too; but Jimmy Knight was too busy with his own perturbation to notice that.
"H'lo yourself," he responded, with something like gruffness, "and see how you like it." As they dropped into step side by side, he added, with an inspired flash, "Lookin' kind of skookum to-night, us, Friend Nixon."
"I might if I had a suit on," Daisy said, in her forthright way, "but suits cost money."
"Never mind," Jimmy, in spite of the playful breeze abroad, strove to pull his new straw hat down more firmly on its elastic cushion of virile, curly hair, "you may have one, soon."
Daisy, who had not meant this at all, cast a quick side-glance at her companion.
"I wouldn't take a suit from you, if that's what you mean," she said, abruptly, flushing a little.
"There, now," Jimmy blushed an honest, vivid red, "I've went and made a break, first crack at the bat. Say, you do the talkin' from here on. I'll just listen. If I don't say nothin', I can't make nobody mad, can I?"