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He cupped his hands about her beautiful, fair face and lifted it, studying it.
“Johnnie—Johnnie—Johnnie Stoddard; the one woman out of all the world for me,” he murmured, his deep voice dropping to a wooing cadence. “I couldn’t love you better—I shall never love you less. Don’t let us foolishly throw away a year out of the days which will be vouchsafed us together. Don’t do it, darling—it’s folly.”
Hard-pressed, Johnnie made only a sort of inarticulate response.
“Come, love, sit a moment with me, here,” pleaded Gray, indicating a small bench hidden among the evergreens and shrubs at the end of the path. “Sit down, and let’s reason this thing out.”
“Reasoning with you,” began Johnnie, helplessly, “isn’t—it isn’t reasonable!”
“It is,” he told her, in that deep, masterful tone which, like a true woman, she both loved and dreaded. “It’s the height of reasonableness. Why, dear, the great primal reason of all things speaks through me. And I won’t let you throw away a year of our love. Johnnie, it isn’t as though we’d been neighbours, and grown up side by side. I came from the ends of the earth to find you, darling—and I knew my own as soon as I saw you.”
He put out his arms and gathered her into a close embrace.
For a space they rested so, murmuring question and reply, checked or answered by swift, sweet kisses.
“The first time I ever saw you, love....”
“Oh, in thoze dusty old shoes and a sunbonnet! Could you love me then, Gray?”
“The same as at this moment, sweetheart. Shoes and sunbonnets—I’m ashamed of you now, Johnnie, in earnest. What do such things matter?”
“And that morning on the mountain, when we got the moccasin flowers,” the girl’s voice took up the theme. “I—it was sweet to be with you—and bitter, too. I could not dream then that you were for me. And afterward—the long, black, dreadful time when you seemed so utterly lost to me—”
At the mention of those months, Gray stopped her words with a kiss.
“Mine,” he whispered with his lips against hers, “Out of all the world—mine.”
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