"Oh, you will have your work--you'll do just what you did before I came up." She was holding herself in by main strength; why, she could not tell--fighting an almost irresistible impulse to hide her face on his breast and cry. "What good will that do me when you are gone?" he burst out, with a quick toss of his head and a certain bitterness in his tone. "Well, but you were very happy before you saw me." Again the cry of the loon came down the ravine. He turned and with one of his quick, impatient gestures that she knew so well, put his hand on her shoulder. "Stop, Madge, stop! Don't talk that way. I can't stand it. Look at me!" The pain had become unbearable now. "You've got to listen. I can't keep it back, and I won't. I never met anybody that I loved as I do you. I didn't think so at first. I never thought I could think so, but it's true. You are not my sweetheart nor my friend, nor my companion, nor anything else that ever came into my life. You are my very breath, my soul, my being. I never want you to leave me. I should never have another happy day if I thought this was to end our life. I laid awake half the night trying to straighten it out, and I can't, and there's no straightening it out and never will be unless you love me. Oh, Madge! Madge! Don't turn away from me. Let me be part of you--part of everything you do--and are--and will be." He caught her hand in his warm palm and laid his cheek upon it. Still holding it fast he raised his head, laid his other hand upon her hair, smoothing it softly, and looked long and earnestly into her eyes as if searching for something hidden in their depths. Then, in a voice of infinite tenderness, he said: "Madge, darling! Tell me true--could you ever love me?" She sat still, her eyes fixed on his, her hand nestling in his grasp. Then slowly and carefully, one at a time, she loosened with her other hand the fingers that lay upon her hair, held them for an instant in her own, bent her head and touched them with her lips. CHAPTER XVI SOME DAYS AT BROOKFIELD FARM Brookfield village lay in a great wide meadow through which strayed one of Moose Hillock's lost brooks--a brook tired out with leaping from bowlder to bowlder and taking headers into deep pools, and plunging down between narrow walls of rock. Here in the meadow it caught its breath and rested, idling along, stopping to bathe a clump of willows; whispering to the shallows; laughing gently with another brook that had locked arms with it, the two gossiping together under their breath as they floated on through the tall grasses fringing the banks, or circled about the lily-pads growing in the eddies. In the middle of the meadow, just where two white ribbons of roads crossed, was a clump of trees pierced by a church-spire. Outside of this bower of green--a darker green than the velvet meadow-grass about it--glistened the roofs and windows of the village houses. All this Oliver saw, at a distance, from the top of the stage.