“Oh, he tried to get too fresh!” was the sister’s rejoinder. She went to her room, destroyed the torn waist and slipped into bed. The MacHenry fellow disappeared from town next day. While Nat had never given his consent to Edith’s nocturnal absences nor abetted them, he was thankful his sister’s interest had waned.
For Nathan, however, no summer was ever quite like that summer. For spring passed and June came, and at least three times a week he left his room as soon as he heard his father’s heavy snoring to return in the moist, mystic hush of dawn—dawn broken only by the energetic chirping of countless song birds and the dull knocking rattle of distant milk wagons.
The news which Milly Richards had brought advised him that he was growing overbold, however. For two weeks thereafter, he and Carol took the Gilberts Mills road instead of going down to the box-shop, where the girl spent the night nestled in her lover’s arms.
So it was not this illicit tryst-keeping, finally wrecked by its own success, that caused Johnathan’s complacency to explode in his face. It was a letter that inadvertently fell from Nathan’s hip pocket one day in the mill and which Joe Partridge brought with a grin to Johnathan.
“Picked up some private correspondence,” he observed. “Guess it belongs to Nathan.”
Private correspondence? Nathan?
Johnathan took the bulky envelope addressed in a woman’s round hand to his son at the local postoffice,—General Delivery. He pulled out the sheets and the opening salutation struck him between the eyes like a brick.
Johnathan was limp all over when he had finished that effusive epistle. The father scarcely had the strength to rise from his chair. He found his hat and coat and went out into the August sunshine. He must think, think.
So they were keeping the asinine courtship alive by correspondence? Fool that he was, he might have suspected.
Yet John had read between the lines of the girl’s letter what was no thumb-nail sentiment between lovesick adolescents. The two addressed each other now as grown man and woman. Fortunately, no references had been made by Carol to their nocturnal rendezvous. Johnathan never knew—and does not appreciate to this day—toward the brink of what precipice he did all in his power to drive his boy. But he knew that Nathan had asked the girl to be his wife. She had accepted him. They were only waiting the saving of enough money on Nathan’s part and the making of enough “clothes” on Carol’s to perfect an elopement.