Quaint Courtships Part 21

"DEAR CHRISTOPHER,--Do you think you really want me? If you are very sure, I am willing. I don't care for anybody else, so perhaps I can learn to care for you.

"The only thing is, you will spoil me, and they've done that at home already! and Rose says I need a strong hand! So in your interests--" and then it had blown away!

When Rose, after some desultory talk, went back to her room, Edith wrote another letter:

"DEAR CHRISTOPHER,--I know you have made a mistake. I don't care for you--to marry you--a bit, but I like you, oh, a quant.i.ty! We have always been such friends, and we always will be, won't we? but not _that_ way.

"Some day you will be very happy with some one else who will suit you better. Then you will know how right I am.

"With kindest wishes,

"EDITH EVERSLEY."

She took this letter down the next morning to put in the bag, but the postman had come and gone. As she stood in the hall holding the letter, Farringdon came up.

"Good morning," he said. "You've missed the postman? I will be very happy to post it for you on my way to church."

"Thank you. But if it's on the way to church, I'm going myself, so I needn't trouble you."

Farringdon merely bowed, without saying anything ba.n.a.l about the absence of trouble. She was demurely conscious beneath his courtesy of the effort he was making to see her handwriting, and she wondered if he thought her refusal rude and a confirmation of his suspicion, or simply casual.

Whatever he thought, it did not prevent the steps as she came out a few hours later in the freshness of white muslin, with her umbrella, prayer-book, and an un.o.btrusive white envelope in her hands.

They were going together down then drive--under his umbrella--before she quite grasped the situation.

"We seem to be the only ones," she hazarded.

"We are," he nodded.

"Mrs. Manstey has a headache," Edith said, "but the others--"

"The sun is too hot!"--he smiled.

"But you--I shouldn't have thought--" She paused, a little embarra.s.sed.

"Yes?" he helped her. "That I was one of those who go to church, you mean?"

"Oh no!" she protested; but it was what she had meant.

"You are right," he said, without heeding the protest, and his ugly but compellingly attractive face was turned to hers. "I'm not in the least a scoffer, though; pray believe that. It's just that I--" he hesitated. "Do you remember a little verse:

'Although I enter not, Yet round about the spot Sometimes I hover, And at the sacred gate With longing eyes I wait, Expectant of her.'"

Her face flushed. "But," she reverted, with navete, "you said you were going to church--"

"But because I knew you were one of the women who would be sure to go!"

he said, positively.

She rebelled. "I don't look devotional at all!"

"But your eyes do," he declared. "They're suggestive of cathedrals and beautiful dimness, and a voice going up and up, like the 'Lark' song of Schubert's, don't you know!"

"No, I _don't!_" she said, wilfully; but she was conscious of his eyes on her face, and angry that her cheeks flushed.

They both were silent for a little, and when they left Mrs. Manstey's grounds for the uneven country road, that became shortly, by courtesy, the village street, they had a view of the little church with its tiny tower.

"The post-office," Farringdon explained, "is at the other end of the street. Service is beginning, I dare say. Shall we wait until it is over, or post the letter now?"

"No; after service," she agreed, and inopportunely the letter slipped from her hand and fell, with the address down, on the gra.s.s. She stooped hurriedly, but he was before her, and picking it up, returned it scrupulously, with the right side down, as it had fallen. She slipped it quickly, almost guiltily, into her prayer-book.

The church was small, the congregation smaller, and the clergyman a little weary of the empty benches. But the two faces in the Manstey pew were so bright, so vivid with the vigor of youth, that his jaded mind freshened to meet the interest of new hearers.

But neither Edith nor Farringdon listened attentively to the sermon, for their minds were busy with other things. He was thinking of the girl beside him, whose hymnal he was sharing, and whose voice, very sweet and clear, if of no great compa.s.s, blended with his own fine tenor. Her thoughts could not stray far from the letter and--from other things!

The benediction sent them from the cool dimness into the sunlight, and she looked down the street toward the post-office.

"It's quite at the other end of the street," Farringdon said, opening his umbrella and tentatively discouraging the effort. "By the way, your letter won't leave, I remember, until the seven-o'clock train. The Brathwaites are leaving by that train; you can send your letter down then."

She found herself accepting this proposition, for the blaze of the sun on the length of the dusty street was deterring. They walked back almost in silence the way they had come; but with his hand on Mrs. Manstey's gate and the house less than two hundred yards away, Farringdon paused.

"You have been writing to 'Christopher,'" he said, quietly. "I don't want you to send the letter." He was quite pale, but she did not notice it or the tensity of his face; his audacity made her for the moment dumb.

"You don't want me to--!" She positively gasped. "I never heard of such--"

"Impertinence," he supplied, gravely. "It looks that way, I know, but it isn't. I can't stand on conventions--I've too much at stake. I don't mean to lose _you_--as you lost your letter!"

She thought she was furious. "You knew it was my letter!" she accused.

They had paused just within the gate, in the shade of a great mulberry-tree that stood sentinel.

"Forgive me," he said. "Not at first--but I guessed it. My name," he added, "is Christopher, too."

He took a crumpled sheet, that had been smoothed and folded carefully, from his pocket. "Do you remember what you wrote?" he asked, in a low voice.

Her face was crimson.

"It blew to me. Such things don't happen every day." He had taken off his hat, and, bareheaded, he bent and looked questioningly into her eyes. "My name is Christopher," he repeated. "I can't--it isn't possible--that I can let another Christopher have that letter."

Her eyes fell before his.

"I"--he paused--"I play tennis very well, you said. I play to win! What I give to the interest of a game--"

"Is nothing to what you give to the interests of Christopher!"

As she mockingly spoke, Farringdon caught a glimpse of one or two people strolling down from the house. "That letter," he hastily said,--"you can't take it from me! Do you remember that wind? It blew _you_ to _me!_ Dearest, _darling_, don't be angry. You _can't_ take yourself away."

A little smile touched her lips--mutinous, but tremulous, too, and something in her look made his heart beat fast.