Where Love Is

by William John Locke

Jimmie touched him on the arm, waved his hand around, indicating the little grey church, the quiet graves.

“This is not the place where a man should say such a thing lightly,” he said.

“I am not the man to say such a thing lightly in any place,” retorted the youth, with spirit.

Jimmie nodded approvingly. “My dear,” he said to Aline, “that is the way I like to hear a man talk.”

He turned and collected the fallen stick and the black bag which he had deposited by the side of the slab. He had gone into Dieppe that morning partly for the sake of the walk and partly to purchase some odds and ends for the house. Aline, not trusting to his memory, had given him a list of items with directions attached as to the places where he was to procure them, so that when he came to “pepper,” he should seek it at a grocery and not at a milliner's establishment. Now, without saying a word, he opened the bag and rummaged among its queer contents, which Aline regarded with some twinges of a tender conscience. She ought to have gone into Dieppe herself, and made her purchases like a notable housewife, instead of sending Jimmie and passing the day in selfish lovemaking. The twinge grew sharper when Jimmie at last fished out a little cardboard box and put it in her hands.

“At any rate, I can give you an engagement present before Tony,” he said with a laugh.

It was only an old filigree silver waist-buckle he had picked up at a curio shop in the town, but it was a gem of infinite value to the girl, for she knew that Jimmie's love went with it. She showed it to Tony Merewether, who admired the workmanship.

“If you can give me anything I shall prize more, you will be a lucky fellow,” she said in a low voice.

The three strolled quietly towards the cottage, and it was Jimmie's arm that Aline clung to, and Mr. Merewether who carried the black bag. That night, after she had dismissed the young man, she sat a long time with Jimmie on the veranda, telling him in one shy breath of the wonder that had suddenly come into her life, and in the next that she would never leave him until he was rich and famous and able to live by himself. Jimmie, unguileful in the nature of men and maidens and the ways of this wicked world, kept on repeating like a refrain his formula of astonishment:

“It never entered my head, dear, that you two children would fall in love with one another.”