"What a pleasant day!"--the saving phrase of life. Then Sally said
something he couldn't hear, and he leaped the low fence without being
asked, rather than request her to raise her voice; he was so considerate!
Next he remembered, just as he turned to go away, that there were some
white violets down in the meadow, that Sally always liked. Couldn't she
spend time to walk down there across lots and get some? Sally thought the
onions could not be left. Truth to tell, her heart was in her mouth. She
had been playing with edge-tools; but just then she smelt a whiff of smoke
from Long Snapps's pipe, and the resolve of last night came back; her face
relented, and George, seeing it, used his utmost persuasiveness; so the
result was, that Sally washed her hands at the well, and away they went, in
the most serene silence, over fences, grass-lots, and ditches, through bits
of woodland, and fields of winter-green, till they reached the edge of the
great meadow, and sat down on a log to rest. It was rather a good place for
that purpose. An old pine had fallen at the feet of a majestic cluster of
its brethren, so close that the broad column of one made a natural back to
part of the seat. The ground was warm, dry sand, strown with the fine dead
leaves of past seasons, brown and aromatic. A light south wind woke the
voices of every bough above, and the melancholy susurrus rose and fell
in delicate cadences; while beyond the green meadow, Westbury River, a
good-sized brook, babbled and danced as if there were no pine-tree laments
in the world.
I believe the air, and the odor, and the crying wind drove the violets
quite out of both the two heads that drooped silently over that pine
log. If Sally had been nervous or poetical, she would have been glad to
recollect them; but no such morbidness invaded her healthy soul. She sat
quite still till George said, in a suppressed and rather broken tone,--
"I was sorry to vex you last night, Sally! I could not be sorry for any
thing else."
"You did grieve me very much, Mister George," said Sally, affecting a
little distance in her address, but sufficiently tender in manner.
"Well, I suppose you don't see it the way I do," returned George; "and I am
very sorry, for I had rather please you than any body else."
This was especially tender, and he possessed himself of Sally's little red
hand, unaware or careless that it smelt of onions; but it was withdrawn
very decidedly.
"I think you take a strange way of showing your liking!" sniffed the
damsel.
George sat astounded. Another tiny spider-thread stopped the fly; a subtle
ray of blue sped sideways out of Sally's eye, that meant,--"I don't object
to be liked."
"I wish with all my heart I knew any good way to please you," he fervently
ejaculated.
"_I_ should think any way to please people was a good way," retorted Sally,
saying more with her eyes than with her voice,--so much more, that in fact
this fly was fast. A little puff of wind blew off Sally's bonnet; she
looked shy, flushed, lovely. George stood up on his feet, and took his hat
off.
"Sally!" said he, in the deepest notes of his full, manly voice, "I love
you very much indeed; will you be my wife?"
Sally was confounded. I rejoice to say she was quite confounded; but she
was made of revolutionary stuff, and what just now interfered with her
plans and schemes was the sudden discovery how very much indeed she loved
George Tucker; a fact she had not left enough margin for in her plot.