so I really think it was no great wonder if his peonies and snowballs that day made the bare little parlor, with the row of staring, uncouth daguerreotypes on the mantel-piece, look very pretty to me, or that to know that he had been there, and was coming back again, made it a very happy place. I walked across it, took off my hot black bonnet, threw up the western window, and sat down beside it in the rocking-chair. The cool breeze struggled through the tree that nestled sociably up to it, and made the little knobs of cherries nod at me, as if saying, "You would not like us now, but you will by and by." The oriole gurgled and giggled from among them, "_Wait!_ Come _again_! Come again! Ha, ha!" The noise of the greedy canker-worms, mincing the poor young green leaves over my head, seemed a soothing sound; and even the sharp headache I had brought with me from the school-room, only a sort of _sauce piquante_ to my delicious rest. I did not ask myself what Jim would say. I scarcely longed to hear him come. I did not know how anything to follow could surpass that perfect luxury of waiting peace. He did come soon. I heard a stealthy step, not on the gravel-walk, but on the rustling hay that lay upon the turf beside it. He looked, and then sprang, in at the window. He was out of breath. He caught my hand, and looked into my face, and asked me to go out and walk with him. Before I had time to answer, he snatched up my bonnet, and almost pressed it down upon my head. As I tied it, he hurried out and looked back at me eagerly from the road. I followed, though more slowly than he wished. The sun was bright and hot, and almost made me faint; but everything was very beautiful. He wrenched out the topmost bar of a fence, _jumped_ me over it into a meadow, led me by a forced march into the middle of the field, seated me on a haycock, and once more stood before me, looking me in the face with his own all aglow. Then he told me that he had been longing for weeks, as I must have seen, to open his mind to me; but, till that day, he had not been at liberty. He had regarded me, from almost the very beginning of our acquaintance, as his best and trustiest friend,--in short, as just what dear Emma had told him he should find me. My friendship had been a blessing to him in every way; and now my sympathy, or participation, was all he wanted to render his happiness complete. He had just been admitted as a partner in _the store_ of the village, in which he had hitherto been only a salesman; and now, therefore, he was at last free to offer himself, before all the world, to the girl he loved best; and that was--I must guess who. He called me "dearest Katy," and asked me if he might not "to-day, at last."