"she's had a good time all right." john maxwell turned to the girl beside him and laughed in the face which looked into his and laughed also. "i never even tried as much as a sentence. she must have some sort of an automatic arrangement somewhere inside of her. does she never run down, never stop talking?"
"never." mary cary was looking ahead at the windows of a large building some distance away. "but she's a dear all the same, and does the work of four people every day of her life. she hasn't, as she says, an educated tongue, but her understanding of human nature is greater than mine or yours is ever likely to be. and she doesn't mind saying what other people think. i like her." she stood still. "did you ever see such an improvement in a place as there has been in the woolen mills in the past year? every window, back, front, and sides, has its box of flowers, and the grounds are downright pretty. i know you thought it was nonsense when i asked you to put flower-boxes in the shoe factory's windows, but you don't know what a help it's been to the hands. their pride is as great as their pleasure, and since the prize of fifty dollars was offered for the best general showing the rivalry is threatening to give trouble."
"of course it is, and then there'll be a strike. but they do look better, both buildings." and john maxwell looked critically first at the large and now rather shabby factory of which he was the owner, and then at the newer woolen mills of which mr. moon was president. "i suppose i did think it was nonsense, putting flower-boxes in factory windows, but if the people like them i'm glad they're there. it must be rather dreary pegging away on leather six days in the week, and if the flowers help, certainly it's a pretty way of helping. but a man wouldn't have thought of it. as a suggester a woman might get a steady job. how did you make mr. moon go in?"
"sarah sue made him. solemn, sensible sarah sue told him it was his duty. you don't know what a help she is. we were born the same year, but she's ages older than i am. and the flowers were just the beginning. they were andirons, you know, and now the factories are so much cleaner. each has a rest-room, and something we call a dining room, where coffee and sandwiches and soup are served every day at cost, just a few pennies for each person. some of these times we hope there is going to be a real dining-room and kitchen in all the factories, but of course everything can't be done at once. don't go that way." she put her hand lightly on his arm. "i want to stop a moment at mr. bailley's and leave him this book. he was paralyzed last week."
the book was left and again they started up the long, partly paved street, never called by a name, which separated milltown from yorkburg, or the silks from the calicoes, as mrs. mcdougal put it, and soon were on king street. the asylum, where the early years of mary cary's life had been spent, stood out clearly against the soft dusk of twilight, and the street, now quite deserted, stretched in a straight tree-bordered line as far as the eye could see. the usual chatter of neighbors on each other's porches was nowhere heard, for the hour was that of supper, but through the open doors and windows came the high notes of children's voices and an occasional clatter of knives and forks.
the sun, which had sunk in a bed of golden glory, had left behind a sky of shifting purple and orange and pink, and, as the colors were absorbed, grew warmer, fainter, widened, narrowed, and were lost, the glow of the dying day faded, and out of the soft grayness one by one the stars appeared.
walking slowly and more slowly, and all unconscious of their lingering steps, john maxwell and mary cary watched in silence the changes in the sky; noted the soft green of trees and grass, the blossoming of old-fashioned flowers in gardens of another day, reached out hands to pull a spray of bridal wreath or yellow jessamine, and as they neared the asylum both stopped, though why they hardly knew themselves.
"study hour," said mary cary, explanatorily. "poor little things! of course i am very impractical, and i would never do for the head of anything, because i have such queer ideas, especially about children. but i don't believe they will ever learn anything in a book that would do them as much good as a beautiful sunset. and yet they're shut up in the house on an evening like this studying something about the sun, perhaps, and not allowed to see its glories and wonders, because it sets at an hour that is set apart for something else. sometimes"—she pulled a bit of bridal wreath to pieces and threw its petals on the ground— "sometimes i wonder if more harm isn't done by too much system than by too little."
"doubtless it is." john maxwell smiled, though in his eyes were other thoughts than those which were filling hers. "but there's been a big change in this place since you were here. that wing was a great improvement. looks now pretty much like a big home instead of a place for herding humans, as it once looked. how i used to hate it!"
"hate it?" they had resumed their walk and she looked up. "i don't see what you hated it for."
"don't you?" he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, and as he put it back in his pocket he looked in her questioning eyes.
"it was because you were in it and i couldn't take you out."
she shook her head. "it was well you couldn't. you wouldn't have known what to do with me, and—"
"i knew what i wanted to do. i wanted mother to send you to the finest school in the country, get you beautiful clothes, and give you everything you wanted until i could marry you. then i was going to pay her back."
"what a silly boy!" she laughed, but she did not look at him. they had turned the corner and were now at the end of the asylum yard, enclosed by its high wooden fence, and as they started to go down the street which would lead into the road to tree hill she laid her hand again on his arm.
"wait a minute." her foot was against a certain paling, and with her heel she made a hole in the ground. "do you remember this?"
"of course i do." sudden color filled his face. "you used to put your apple there. every time i came for it my heart nearly jumped in the hole you hid it in, i was so afraid i'd be seen and would have to stop coming. i never ate one of those apples. i couldn't."
"i don't see why you didn't. they were awfully nice apples. i loved them."
"i know you did." he looked straight ahead. "that's why i couldn't eat yours. it used to make me so fighting furious to think—to think things were like they were that every night i'd throw rocks at the brick wall in front of the house for half an hour before i went home. did you know the first time i ever saw you you were hanging over that wall? it was on a sunday afternoon and i asked the boy with me what was your name. from that sunday to the week you went away i never missed going to sunday-school. mother couldn't understand it. she didn't know you were compelled to be there. that's the one bit of system i approved of in your institution.
"i don't remember whether it was on the next sunday after i saw you looking over the wall that i made up my mind i was going to marry you, or the sunday after, but it was one or the other. that was over ten years ago, and—"
"we ought to be home this minute." she started down the half-dark street. "i'm not going to listen to things like that. besides, it's after supper-time and hedwig will be tired of waiting. you walk so slow, john!"
"all right." he joined her and together they turned into the calverton road, up which at the top of the hill was the home now her own. "if you don't want to hear me i'll wait until later." he smiled in the half-knowing face. "you are tired, aren't you, of my asking when you are going to marry me? i'm perfectly willing to stop, but not until you tell me."
"do you think i'd marry anybody for years and /years/ and years?" she rolled the "years" out with increasing emphasis on each. "i have just begun to really live here—to start some things; to get used to having a home of my own; to knowing all the people. and then" —she looked in his face, indignant protest in her eyes—"there's miss gibbie. do you think i would go away and leave her like this?"
"it is asking a good deal, i know." out of his voice had dropped all lightness and in it were quiet purpose and gravity. "and in asking it i may seem selfish, yet i do ask it. for ten years i have had but one thought, one hope, one dream, if you will. it took me through college that i might please you; made me settle down to work at once when through with study; made me hold all my property interests here because i know you loved the place. but not until two years ago did i ask you to marry me."
"what did you ask me for then?" she interrupted, pulling a branch of a mock-orange bush on the side of the road and stripping it of its leaves. "we are such good friends, john, you and i. we have always been, and i don't want you to marry anybody—not even me." she turned to him, but she did not hear his quick, indrawing breath. "i need you too much, john. you always know the things i don't, and you unravel all the knots and straighten all the twisted strings when i get mixed up, but if we got married it wouldn't be the same at all."
"why wouldn't it?"
"it wouldn't." she shook her head. "i'd be thinking just about you, and that—"
"wouldn't be bad for me." his steady eyes looked into her unawakened ones. "i should ask nothing more of life."
"but life would ask something more of me. don't you see it would be just selfishness. mary mightn't mind"—her forehead puckered—"mary always was self-indulgent, and if martha didn't watch her—" she threw the stripped twig away impetuously. "i am not going to get married, i'm not. i don't see why men always tag love in. just as soon as i get to be real friends with a man and like him just—just as he is, he turns round and spoils it! why can't they let love alone?"
"love will not let them alone, i imagine." he looked down on her, frowning slightly, in his eyes sudden pain as of fear for her.
"you are such a child, mary. many things you can be serious about.
love alone you treat lightly. i don't understand you."
"and i don't understand love—the kind you mean. and if it is going to make me as cross and huffy and injured as it seems to do some people i don't want to know. i thought love was the happiest thing in life."
"it is. or the unhappiest."
she turned. the note in his voice was new. bitterness did not belong to john.
"are you going to do like that, too, and—be like the rest? why can't we keep on in the old way, john, and be as we've been so long? we were happy and—"
"because i can't go on in the old way and be happy. i want you with me. i need you. and you—you need me, mary. you are so alone here, except for miss gibbie, and you know so little of—of so many things in life. when are you going to be my wife?"
"i really—do—not—know!" with each word was a nod. "i am too busy to get married. i don't want a husband yet. he'd be so in the way." she looked at him, eyebrows slightly raised. "i don't think that expression on your face suits you. and if i've got to look at it all through supper it won't make things taste very nice. that is one of the troubles about getting married. the foot of the table could be so unpleasant!"
with a half frown, half sigh, he turned his head away. "i wonder if you will ever grow up? and i wonder, also, if in all your thought for others you will ever think of me?"
he stood aside that she might pass between the vine-covered pillars marking the entrance to tree hill, and looking ahead saw hedwig standing in the porch.
"there is you friend faithful," he said, and his face cleared.
