"You shall have me always, Asenath," he made answer. He took her face
within his hands and kissed it; and so they shelled the corn together,
and nothing more was said about it.

He had spoken this last spring of their marriage; but the girl, like all
girls, was shyly silent, and he had not urged it.

Asenath started from her pleasant dreaming just as the oriflamme was
furling into gray, suddenly conscious that she was not alone. Below her,
quite on the brink of the water, a girl was sitting,--a girl with a
bright plaid shawl, and a nodding red feather in her hat. Her head was
bent, and her hair fell against a profile cut in pink-and-white.

"Del is too pretty to be here alone so late," thought Asenath, smiling
tenderly. Good-natured Del was kind to her in a certain way, and she
rather loved the girl. She rose to speak to her, but concluded, on a
second glance through the aspens, that Miss Ivory was quite able to take
care of herself.

Del was sitting on an old log that jutted into the stream, dabbling in
the water with the tips of her feet. (Had she lived on The Avenue she
could not have been more particular about her shoemaker.) Some one--it
was too dark to see distinctly--stood beside her, his eyes upon her
face. Asenath could hear nothing, but she needed to hear nothing to know
how the young fellow's eyes drank in the coquettish picture. Besides, it
was an old story. Del counted her rejected lovers by the score.

"It's no wonder," she thought in her honest way, standing still to watch
them with a sense of puzzled pleasure much like that with which she
watched the print-windows,--"it's no wonder they love her. I'd love her