you're going to get
quite a few refusals ahead of me, no doubt, before--before I catch up
with you! But don't you waste one bit of worry on me.

"It would be your telling me that you did care, and then telling me
that you didn't, that would about break me. I have to keep on asking
you; I have to keep on trying, but you can tell me 'no chance'
whenever, in your heart, you believe it to be the truth, and I'll take
it smiling. Just don't let it become mechanical, that's all I ask,
will you? And--and if some day after I've gone, you suddenly begin to
wish, even the tiniest bit, that you hadn't made the last refusal
quite--quite so final, you needn't let that worry you, either. Because
I'll be back! You can know that I'll come back, next day--next
month--next year--thirty miles or three hundred--oh, just to see if my
chances haven't improved any! That does make you smile, doesn't it? I
reckon experienced match-makers would tell me that that isn't the way
for me to talk if I'm going to win out. But it's the way I like best.
I want you to know that there is one person you can be sure of, all the
days of your life. I began a dozen years ago--I've only started loving
the whiteness of you."

She rode with wide eyes fastened upon his now wholly smiling face; rode
with lips parted, all else submerged in that wonder which quickened her
breath. Once she leaned toward him as if to speak, and then shook her
head at the inadequacy of the words. They topped the last rise in the
dusty, winding road and raised the river basin and the town itself in
that long period of silence. There, once more, she checked the roan
mare.

"If women could care like that," she told him quietly. "If I believed
that I could ever----" She shook her head with a sad little smile.
"Since you have come home you've made me feel very insignificant and
petty at times. You've made me wish I might have been as--as wonderful
as you say I am to you. But I know, you see." She lifted one slim arm
toward the newer Morrison stretched out along the river front. "Do you
remember the first day you saw the village it used to be, that day when
you first came down river?"

Steve knew what she was going to say. She read amused anticipation in
his eyes and grew self-conscious at it.

"I thought yours was a perfectly good parallel," she asserted stoutly.
"And you'll have to admit that you did believe it was wonderful then.
Uncle Cal has told me how breathles