"It is asking a good deal, I know." Out of his voice had dropped all lightness and in it were quiet purpose and gravity. "And in asking it I may seem selfish, yet I do ask it. For ten years I have had but one thought, one hope, one dream, if you will. It took me through college that I might please you; made me settle down to work at once when through with study; made me hold all my property interests here because I know you loved the place. But not until two years ago did I ask you to marry me." "What did you ask me for then?" she interrupted, pulling a branch of a mock-orange bush on the side of the road and stripping it of its leaves. "We are such good friends, John, you and I. We have always been, and I don't want you to marry anybody--not even me." She turned to him, but she did not hear his quick, indrawing breath. "I need you too much, John. You always know the things I don't, and you unravel all the knots and straighten all the twisted strings when I get mixed up, but if we got married it wouldn't be the same at all." "Why wouldn't it?" "It wouldn't." She shook her head. "I'd be thinking just about you, and that--" "Wouldn't be bad for me." His steady eyes looked into her unawakened ones. "I should ask nothing more of life." "But life would ask something more of me. Don't you see it would be just selfishness. Mary mightn't mind"--her forehead puckered--"Mary always was self-indulgent, and if Martha didn't watch her--" She threw the stripped twig away impetuously. "I am not going to get married, I'm not. I don't see why men always tag love in. Just as soon as I get to be real friends with a man and like him just--just as he is, he turns round and spoils it! Why can't they let love alone?" "Love will not let them alone, I imagine." He looked down on her, frowning slightly, in his eyes sudden pain as of fear for her. "You are such a child, Mary. Many things you can be serious about. Love alone you treat lightly. I don't understand you." "And I don't understand love--the kind you mean. And if it is going to make me as cross and huffy and injured as it seems to do some people I don't want to know. I thought love was the happiest thing in life." "It is. Or the unhappiest." She turned. The note in his voice was new. Bitterness did not belong to John. "Are you going to do like that, too, and--be like the rest? Why can't we keep on in the old way, John, and be as we've been so long? We were happy and--" "Because I can't go on in the old way and be happy. I want you with me. I need you. And you--you need me, Mary. You are so alone here, except for Miss Gibbie, and you know so little of--of so many things in life. When are you going to be my wife?"