Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/151

Rh Prayer-book, once, in a second-hand book-stall in Liverpool. It's like poetry—some of it. It runs on like music in parts. Do you like that book, too, miss?" he inquired eagerly. "I mean, Rebecca?" he added.

"I never read it, I'm afraid," Reba had to confess. "It's Episcopalian, I think."

"I guess so. No doubt. Well, anyhow, the marriage ceremony is all in it. I can't make myself think you're willing to get up before a minister and say outloudout-loud [sic] that you're willing to take me 'for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part.' But I suppose you are—I suppose I've heard right, that you are."

"Yes, I am."

"Well, then, I better take you home now. You'll be getting wet," he said.

"But hadn't you—wouldn't you like to know more about me, before we consider it absolutely settled?" Reba asked. "Who I am, I mean, and my folks, and all that, just as you've told me—and my age," she brought out.

"It wouldn't make any difference," he remarked quietly.

"It might. I meant to tell you right off. I'm older than you are," she confessed.

"It wouldn't make any difference," he repeated.

"I'm two years older," she told him.

"It wouldn't make any difference," he said for the third time.

Again a silence. They were embarrassing to-night—these silences, Reba thought. He stared so, and breathed so, and appeared to take it all so seriously.