or twice, "Merry." She rode with him, danced with him.
"I am not doing many gay things—but we take up the rugs in the living-room and put on the records, and I am not nearly as awkward as I thought I'd be."
So, almost in spite of herself, she was being swept on to new adventures, and it was not he who shared them, but Meriweather. It was Meriweather who might in time come to share her confidences.
Then young Crispin, looking off toward the south, said in his heart:
"She is mine. No one else shall have her."
If Hildegarde had loved him, he would have felt no fears. Perhaps she did love him, but she had made no promises. And letters were a slender bond with which to hold a woman.
A little moon was hanging over the hills when at last he turned toward home. The valley lay all purple shadows below him. But it was to the sky that he lifted his face as he went along. "God give her to me," he said, and found that his eyes were wet.
That night he talked to his father and mother. "I want to go to Baltimore for the Christmas holidays, to see Hildegarde."
"Is it an invitation?" his mother asked.
"No. But no one ever gets a thing unless he goes after it."
They smiled at him. "So that's it," was what their smiles meant.
"Hildegarde's mine," Crispin told them. "I'm not going to let anybody else have her, and the way to win a woman is to win her."
