The train stopped where a beautiful lane crossed the track between two fenced fields. Fair and Barbara alighted and stood on a flowery bank with the sun glowing in some distant tree-tops behind them. Fannie leaned from the train, took both Jeff-Jack's uplifted hands and fluttered down upon rebounding tiptoes; the bell sounded, the scene changed, and John murmured to himself in heavy agony, "He's going to ask her! O, Fannie, Fannie, if you'd only refuse to say yes, and give me three years to show what I can do! But he's going to ask her before that sun goes down, and what's she going to say?" XXVIII. INFORMATION FOR SALE "Hope of Suez!" Garnet felt he had spoken just these three words too many. "Overtalked myself again," he said to himself while chatting with others; "a liar always does. But he shall pay for this. Ah me!" He was right. The young man would have sucked down all his flattery but for those three words. Yet on one side they were true, and March guiltily felt them so as, looking at his mother, he thought again of that deep store of the earth's largess lying under their unfruitful custody. Suez and her three counties would have jeered the gaudy name from Lover's Leap to Libertyville though had they guessed better the meaning of the change into which a world's progress was irresistibly pushing them, whoever owned Widewood must have stood for some of their largest wishes and hopes, and they would have ceased to deride the blessed mutation and to hobble it with that root of so many world-wide evils--the calling still private what the common need has made public. The ghost of this thought flitted in John's mind, but would not be grasped or beckoned to the light. "I wish I could think," he sighed, but he could only think of Fannie. The train stopped. The excursionists swarmed forth. The cannon belched out its thunderous good-byes, and John went for his horse and buggy, promising to give word for Garnet's equipage to be sent to him. "I must mind Johanna and her plunder," said the Major; "but I'll look after your mother, too." And he did so, though he found time to part fondly with the Proudfits. "He won't do," thought John, as he glanced back from a rise of ground. "Fannie's right. And she's right about me, too; the only way to get her is to keep away till I've shown myself fit for her; that's what she means; of course she can't say so; but I'm satisfied that's what she means!" He passed two drunken men. Here in town at the end of Suez's wedding so many had toasted it so often, it was as if Susie's own eyes were blood-shot and her steps uncertain. "It's my wedding, too," he soliloquized. "This Widewood business and I are married this day; it alone, to me alone, till it's finished. Garnet shall see whether--humph!--Jake, my horse and buggy!" And soon he was rattling back down the stony slopes toward his mother.