"It's all-fired lonesome f'r me out there on that claim, and it ain't no picnic f'r you here. Now, if you'll come out there with me, you needn't do anything but cook f'r me, and after harvest we can git a good layout o' furniture, an' I'll lath and plaster the house and put a little hell [ell] in the rear." He smiled, and so did she. He felt encouraged to say: "An' there we be, as snug as y' please. We're close t' Boomtown, an' we can go down there to church sociables an' things, and they're a jolly lot there." The girl was still silent, but the man's simple enthusiasm came to her charged with passion and a sort of romance such as her hard life had known little of. There was something enticing about this trip to the West. "What'll my folks say?" she said at last. A virtual surrender, but Rob was not acute enough to see it. He pressed on eagerly: "I don't care. Do you? They'll jest keep y' ploughin' corn and milkin' cows till the day of judgment. Come, Julyie, I ain't got no time to fool away. I've got t' get back t' that grain. It's a whoopin' old crop, sure's y'r born, an' that means sompin purty scrumptious in furniture this fall. Come, now." He approached her and laid his hand on her shoulder very much as he would have touched Albert Seagraves or any other comrade. "Whaddy y' say?" She neither started nor shrunk nor looked at him. She simply moved a step away. "They'd never let me go," she replied bitterly. "I'm too cheap a hand. I do a man's work an' get no pay at all." "You'll have half o' all I c'n make," he put in. "How long c'n you wait?" she asked, looking down at her dress. "Just two minutes," he said, pulling out his watch. "It ain't no use t' wait. The old man'll be jest as mad a week from now as he is to-day. Why not go now?" "I'm of age in a few days," she mused, wavering, calculating. "You c'n be of age to-night if you'll jest call on old Square Hatfield with me." "All right, Rob," the girl said, turning and holding out her hand. "That's the talk!" he exclaimed, seizing it. "And now a kiss, to bind the bargain, as the fellah says." "I guess we c'n get along without that." "No, we can't. It won't seem like an engagement without it." "It ain't goin' to seem much like one, anyway," she answered, with a sudden realization of how far from her dreams of courtship this reality was. "Say, now, Julyie, that ain't fair; it ain't treatin' me right. You don't seem to understand that I like you, but I do." Rob was carried quite out of himself by the time, the place, and the girl. He had said a very moving thing. The tears sprang involuntarily to the girl's eyes. "Do you mean it? If y' do, you may." She was trembling with emotion for the first time. The sincerity of the man's voice had gone deep.