it's a purty dum good thing, after all. Purty good
thing, after all,' he repeated, gaping as he spoke.

He began nodding shortly, and soon he went asleep in his chair.

Chapter 20

We went back to our work again shortly, the sweetness and the bitterness
of life fresh in our remembrance. When we came back, 'hook an' line',
for another vacation, the fields were aglow with colour, and the roads
where Dr Bigsby had felt the sting of death that winter day were now
over drifted with meadow-music and the smell of clover. I had creditably
taken examination for college, where I was to begin my course in the
fall, with a scholarship. Hope had made remarkable progress in music and
was soon going to Ogdensburg for instruction.

A year had gone, nearly, since Jed Feary had cautioned me about falling
in love. I had kept enough of my heart about me 'to do business with',
but I had continued to feel an uncomfortable absence in the region of
it. Young men at Hillsborough--many of whom, I felt sure, had a smarter
look than I--had bid stubbornly for her favour. I wondered, often, it
did not turn her head--this tribute of rustic admiration. But she seemed
to be all unconscious of its cause and went about her work with small
conceit of herself. Many a time they had tried to take her from my arm
at the church door--a good-natured phase of youthful rivalry there in
those days--but she had always said, laughingly, 'No, thank you,' and
clung all the closer to me. Now Jed Feary had no knowledge of the worry
it gave me, or of the peril it suggested. I knew that, if I felt free
to tell him all, he would give me other counsel. I was now seventeen and
she a bit older, and had I not heard of many young men and women who had
been engaged--aye, even married--at that age? Well, as it happened, a
day before she left us, to go to her work in Ogdensburg, where she was
to live with her uncle, I made an end of delay. I considered carefully
what a man ought to say in the circumstances, and I thought I had near
an accurate notion. We were in the garden--together--the playground of
our childhood.

'Hope, I have a secret to tell you,' I said.

'A secret,' she exclaimed eagerly. 'I love secrets.'

'A great secret,' I repeated, as I felt my face burning.

'Why--it must be something awful!'

'Not very,' I stammered. Having missed my cue from the beginning, I was
now utterly confused.

'William!' she exclaimed, 'what is the matter of you.'

'I--I am