The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,--I who had stood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of sex, into her sparkling eyes. "And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly. "Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics." "I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," I said. With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance, straight and full, like a gallant boy. "Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it." We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy which to me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly. "You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all my life," I said. "The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" she asked. "Only to the end of the _c_'s. Don't credit me, please, with the whole alphabet." "The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn the _a_, _b_, _c_'s of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" "If you wish it I will tell you what it was." For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is Franklin Street, and in a little while we shall be at home." "It is not long--it is very short. It is a single word of three letters." "I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?" "Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters." "What an elastic word!" "It is, for it has covered everything at which I looked--both the earth and the sky." "And the General and the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad?" "Without that word the General and the railroad would have been nothing." "How very much obliged to it the poor General must be!" "Will you hear it?" I asked, for when I was once started to the goal there was no turning me by laughter. She raised her eyes, which had been lowered, and looked at me long and deeply--so long and deeply that it seemed as if she were seeking something within myself of which even I was unconscious. "Will you hear it?" I asked again. Her gaze was still on mine. "What is the word?" she asked, almost in a whisper. At the instant I felt that I staked my whole future, and yet that it was no longer in my power to hesitate or to draw back. "The word is--you," I replied. Her hand dropped from the mare's neck, where it had almost touched mine, and I watched her mouth grow tremulous until the red of it showed in a violent contrast to the clear pallor of her face. Then she turned her head away from me toward the sun, and thoughtful and in silence, we passed down Franklin Street to the old grey house. CHAPTER XIII IN WHICH I RUN AGAINST TRADITIONS When we had delivered the mare to the coloured groom waiting on the sidewalk, she turned to me for the first time since I had uttered my daring word.