Had John been other than the crude working-boy that he was, he might have made a more adroit answer, but, even as it was, it was not unpleasing to his sly tormentor.
"What is he hanging around you so much for?" John demanded. "I've heard that your father doesn't like him. What does he mean by coming, at the slightest excuse, like to-night, for instance?"
"Joel and I have been friends ever since we were tiny tots," Tilly answered, as casually as a school-girl chewing gum. "And even if—if he really does love me and—and wants me to be his wife, should he be blamed for that?"
The very suggestion of her marriage to any one, and that man in particular, drove John wild. He bit his lip; he swore under his breath, and his oaths had never been guarded before meeting Tilly; his eyes flashed from the fires behind them. He clenched his fists.
"You are mine, mine, mine!" he said to himself with the grinding teeth of a cave-man, and he was all but unaware that his words were not audible. She was smiling up at him, so sweetly, so placidly. What a nimbus of transcendental charm hovered over the wonderful face in the moonlight. Suddenly he checked his onward stride, caught her, and drew her around facing him. What he might have said or done he never knew, but Tilly gravely started on again, gently extracting her hand from his fierce clasp and restoring it to his arm.
"We must not stop," she said. "I hear a horse behind us. It is somebody going to the party, perhaps."
He said nothing as her fingers left his, and they walked on again. It was a horse and a buggy containing a couple from the village. Tilly spoke merrily to them and they answered back as they dashed on.
"It is Marietta Slocum and Fred Murray," Tilly explained. "They are engaged."
"Engaged?" The word seemed to fill the entire consciousness of the crude social anomaly. He told himself that an engagement must naturally precede marriage, and how was that to come about with that helpless tongue in his mouth? Besides, how did he know but that Tilly might refuse him? How did he know but that there might even now be some understanding between her and Eperson? The sheer thought chilled him like a blast from a cavern of ice. She seemed to feel the limpness of the arm she held or in some way to sense the despair that was on him so quickly following the mood she had interrupted only a moment before.
"You are so strange!" she sighed, taking a better grasp on his arm, and even bearing down on it slightly as she lowered her head thoughtfully. "You are a mystery to me. I can't make you out."