"But perhaps it will come to you." He was no easy loser. "I'll just keep on hoping that some day you'll care for me." "Don't do that. I'm positive, sure, that I'll never love you. You and I were never made for each other." But he refused to accept her answer as final. "Who knows, Amanda," he said lightly, yet with all the feeling he was capable of at that time, "perhaps you'll love and marry Lyman Mertzheimer yet! Stranger things than that have happened. I'm sorry about that word. It seemed just like a good joke to catch on to the right spelling that way and beat the others in the match. You are too strict, Amanda, too closely bound by the Lancaster County ideas of right and wrong. They are too narrow for these days." "Oh, no!" she said quickly. "Dishonesty is never right!" "Well," he laughed, "have it your way! See how docile I have become already! You'll reform me yet, I bet!" At the door of her home he bade her good-night and went off whistling, feeling only a slight unhappiness at her refusal to marry him. It was, he felt, but a temporary rebuff. She would capitulate some day. His consummate egotism buoyed his spirits and he went down the road dreaming of the day he'd marry Amanda Reist and of the wonderful gowns and jewels he would lavish upon her. CHAPTER IX AT THE MARKET The words of Lyman Mertzheimer lingered with Amanda for many days. He had seemed so confident, so arrogantly sure, of her ultimate surrender to his desire to marry her. Soon after the Spelling Bee he returned to his college and the girl sighed in relief that his presence was not annoying her. But she reckoned without the efficient United States mail service. The rejected lover wrote lengthy, friendly letters which she answered at long intervals by short, impersonal little notes. "Oh, yea," she said to herself one day, "why does it have to be Lyman Mertzheimer that falls in love with me? But he might as well fall out as soon as he can. I'll never marry him. I read somewhere that one girl said, 'I'd rather love what I cannot have, than have what I cannot love,' and that's just the way I feel about it. I won't marry Lyman Mertzheimer if I have to die Amanda Reist!" As soon as her school term was ended Amanda entered into the work of the farm. She helped Millie as much as possible in a determined effort to forget all about the man who wanted her and whom she did not want, and, more than that, to think less about her knight, her Sir Galahad, who evidently had no time to waste on girls. Millie appreciated Amanda's help. "There's one thing sure," she said proudly to Mrs. Reist, "our Amanda ain't lazy. It seems to abody she's workin' more'n ever this here spring. I guess mebbe she thinks she better get all the ins and outs o' housework so as she can do it right till she gets married once." "Ach, I guess Amanda ain't thinkin' of marryin' yet," said the mother.