"Oh, you want me to be a sort of Luke King, who put all sorts of fancies in your head when you were too young to know what they meant. You’d better let those dreams alone, Virginia, and get down to everyday facts. My love for you is a reality. It’s a big force in my life. I find myself thinking about you and your coldness from early morning till late at night. Last Monday you were to come to the Henry Spring, and I was there long before the time, and stayed in agony of suspense for four hours, but I had my walk for nothing." "I couldn’t come," Ann Boyd heard the sweet voice say. "Mother gave me some work to do, and I had no excuse; besides, I don’t like to deceive her. She’s harsh and severe, but I don’t like to do anything she would disapprove of." "You don’t really care much for me," said Langdon—"that is the whole thing in a nutshell." Virginia was silent, and Ann Boyd bit her lip and clinched her hands tightly. The very words and tone of enforced reproach came back to her across the rolling surf of time. She was for a moment lost in retrospection. The young girl behind the bushes seemed suddenly to be herself, her companion the dashing young Preston Chester, the prince of planters and slave-holders. Langdon’s insistent voice brought back the present. "You don’t care for me, you know you don’t," he was saying. "You were simply born with all your beauty and sweetness to drag me down to despair. You make me desperate with your maddening reserve and icy coldness, when all this hot fire is raging in me." "That’s what makes me afraid of you," Virginia said, softly. "I admit I like to be with you, my life is so lonely, but you always say such extravagant things and want to—to catch hold of me, and kiss me, and—" "Well, how can I help myself, when you are what you are?" Chester exclaimed, with a laugh. "I don’t want to act a lie to you, and stand and court you like a long-faced Methodist parson, who begins and ends his love-making with prayer. Life is too beautiful and lovely to turn it into a funeral service from beginning to end. Let’s be happy, little girl; let’s laugh and be merry and thank our stars we are alive." "I won’t thank my stars if I don’t go on home." And Virginia laughed sweetly for the first time. "Yes, I suppose we had better walk on," Langdon admitted, "but I’m not going out into the open road with you till I’ve had that kiss. No, you needn’t pull away, dear—I’m going to have it."