Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-70.djvu/270

260 "It makes you too miserable to stay near me?"

"It makes me too happy!"

"You are going away because you are too happy?"

If some alight raillery in the girl's manner made itself felt, in her whole tone and expression there was so much that was delightful and beguiling that his grave face lighted up.

"Of course, you consider me incomprehensible," he now remarked. "But I intended to explain."

"By letter?"

He did not answer on the moment, but seemed to ponder. At this moment was heard the shriek of a locomotive.

"There goes my train!" he exclaimed.

"Also your chance of escape for a whole hour and fifty minutes?"

"Where could we talk?" he now asked. "I must have a chance to justify myself."

High Elms is near the sea, and after a walk through a quiet street, one may find a lane which, followed until it meets a foot-bridge over a tide-creek, comes presently upon sand-hills, and beyond them a stone-littered shore where there is a group of rocks. The place was already well-known to these two young people, and it was here that half an hour later they again encountered. The tide was out in the bay, and all the pebbles on the wide, bare beach were shining in the morning sunlight, taking on all the hues of the opal until they met the keen blue of the water-line.

On one of the rocks, partly in the shadow of a gnarled apple-tree, which, beaten and buffeted as it had been all its lifetime, still felt the stirring of the spring and now put on a mantle of rosy bloom, sat the girl, while the young man stood a little distance below, and leaned his arms on the ledge which she made her footstool.

"Now let me argue my own case," he said. "I want you to be the judge."

She gave a little wave of the hand.

"I will make a desperate plunge, and get my share of the confession soon over," he proceeded. "I have no intention of letting you think I am halting between two states of mind. I fell in love with you three years ago."

She listened with a feeling that with his eyes fixed on her face he was studying her every expression.

"Three whole years," she said, with some visible effort.

"What I said to myself then was, that you were fenced away from me with a warning to trespassers, 'Thou shalt not!' I was not only too poor a man to ask you to marry me, but my first duty then, as now, was to my mother and sisters."

"One of the reasons I like you so well," she replied with a soft