A Literary Courtship/Chapter 17
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WHEN I got home, long after dark, I found John striding up and down my room in a blaze of glory from all the gas-burners, every one of which he had lighted up, for some reason best known to himself.
"Hullo!" said I. "Got back?"
To which original greeting he responded by wringing my hand unmercifully.
"Good heavens, Jack!" I groaned, partly from physical anguish, partly from the shock of a tremendous conviction. "You don't want my hand."
He dropped it, and then he laughed, that splendid old laugh of his that would make a raven smile.
"Dick, you blessed youngster," said he, "aren't you going to congratulate me?"
"John Brunt," said I, "you haven't done the deed?"
He says my voice was awe-struck, but I know better. Awe was not the emotion I felt at the moment.
"Yes, Dick," he said, with a sudden solemnity, "she has accepted me."
"What! On horseback?" I cried, for that circumstance was really the first thing that struck me.
"Yes, on horseback," he admitted, and then he laughed again.
I did not press for details. In fact I was too much taken aback at first to ask any more questions, and I found John more inclined to talk of the earlier part of the trip. He gave a comical account of little Miss Willet's consternation when she found that her secret was out. But John swore himself and me also to secrecy, and bye and bye she thawed out and let him see her joy in the book, which she handled in a caressing way that told her story better than words.
On their way home he seems to have confessed to his companion how he had tormented himself with the question of the authorship, and that was sure to bring about a declaration, as anybody could see.
They rode in over the lower Mesa. It was getting dark, and was so cold that they rode fast. I can imagine how the hoof beats chimed in with John's impetuous words, and if Miss Lamb is the woman I take her for, her own pulse must have kept time with both.