whistling. The steady heating of an oak branch
on the porch roof told me it was blowing hard. It sounded cold. Mary
stood tiptoe to reach my collar and turn it up. Then she buttoned me
snug around the neck. It was the first time a woman had ever done that
for me. How good it was! I absently turned the collar down again and
tore my coat open. Then I smiled.

Again she raised herself tiptoe before me, and with a hand on each
shoulder, she stood looking from her eyes into mine.

"You fraud!" she cried.

Then I laughed. Lord, how I laughed! Twenty-four years I had lived,
and until now I had never known a real joke, one that made the heart
beat quicker, and sent the blood singing through the veins; that made
the fingers tingle, the ears burn, and brought tears to the eyes. I
don't suppose that other people would have thought this one so amusing.
The young doctor upstairs might not have feigned a smile, for instance.
That was what made it all the better for me, for it was my own joke and
Mary's, and in all the world I was the only man who could see the fun
of it.

"When you turn that collar up again I am going," said I.

So she sprang away from me, laughing, and quick as I reached out to
seize her, she avoided me.

"You know I can't catch you," I cried, taunting her, "so I must wait."

As she stood there before me quietly, her hands clasped, her eyes
looking up into mine, I saw how fair she was, and I wondered. The
picture of Weston in the woods, standing off there gazing at me, came
back then, and with it a vague feeling of fear and distrust. I saw
myself as Weston saw me, and I marvelled.

"Mary," I said, "this morning up there in the woods I told Robert
Weston everything, and he stood off just as you are standing now. It
seemed to me he wondered how it could be true, and now I wonder too.
Maybe it's all a mistake."

"It's not a mistake, Mark," the girl said, and she came to me again and
put a hand on each shoulder and looked up. "If I did not care for you
I'd never have given you the promise I did last night. But I do care
for you, Mark, more than for anyone else in the world. You are big and
strong and good--that's why--it's all any woman can ask. You are true,
Mark--and that's more than most men----"

"But, Mary, there's Tim," I protested, for I did not care to usurp to
myself the sum of all the virtues allotted to my sex.

"Tim?" said she lightly, as though she had never heard of him.

"