Ten minutes later they tied the horses to the new hitching post and passed into the yard. "It is to be your house and mine, dearie," the young man said, and then looked down at her to see why she did not answer. Elizabeth was walking toward the house which was to be hers, oblivious of time and place, almost unconscious of the man at her side, stunned by the unexpectedness of this precious gift of love which had just been offered her. As they stepped upon the little back porch, he said: "I brought you over to ask your advice about the stairway; the carpenters want to leave one step in the sitting room. It'll be back far enough from the chimney to be out of the way and it makes their calculations easier about the stairs somehow. What do you think?" Elizabeth was altogether too new in the sense of possession to grasp the full significance of the question. John Hunter laughed at the look she turned upon him and said, with a large and benevolent wave of the hand, indicating the entire premises: "The house is yours, little girl, and you are to have it as you want it. The only desire I have on earth is to do things for you." Elizabeth shot a quick look of joy up to him. "No one but Aunt Susan has ever wanted to do anything for me," she said, and opening her arms held them out to him, crying, "Am I to be happy? John! John! do you love me, really?" And that was the burden of their conversation during the entire stay. "It can't be possible, John," the happy girl said at one point. "I have never known love--and--and I want it till I could die for it." "Just so you don't die _of_ it, You'll be all right," John Hunter replied, and went home from Nathan's, later, whistling a merry tune. He had not known that love poured itself out with such abandonment. It was a new feature of the little god's manoeuvring, but John doubted not that it was the usual thing where a girl really cared for a man. "I'll farm the whole place next year, and It'll be different from boarding at the Chamberlains', where they don't have any napkins and the old man sucks his coffee out of his saucer as if it hurt him. Mother 'll like her too, after we get her away from that sort of thing and brush her up, and get her into the Hunter ways," he told himself as he tied the pony in the dark stall.