In the silence that she had imposed on herself while her champion was battling she had been gathering courage, piling up the ammunition of resolution.  Love lighted her eyes and flung out its signal banners of challenge on her cheeks.

“Why, our girl has never said that she is in love with anybody,” prated the father.

“I’ll say it now, when there’s a good reason for saying it,” cried the girl, her tones thrilling the listeners.  “I’ll say it in my own way to the one who is entitled to know, and you may listen, father and mother!”

She went to Frank, stretching her hands to him, and he took them in his grasp.  “I understand!  I can wait,” she told him.  “And when the time comes and you call to me, I’ll say, as Ruth said, ’Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’” Impulsively, heeding only him, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.  Then she ran from the room.

And finding the light gone out of the place, Frank groped to the door, like a blind man feeling his way, and departed.

CHAPTER IX

THE NIGHT BROUGHT COUNSEL

Mr. Britt, left with the father and mother, got his voice first because he had been pricked most deeply; furthermore, the girl’s method of expression had touched him on the spot which had been abraded by Prophet Elias’s daily rasping.

The suitor drove his fist down on the center table with a force that caused the model of Mr. Harnden’s doors to jump and snap.  “By the joo-dinged, hump-backed Hosea, I’ve just about got to my limit in this text business!”

“The dear girl is all wrought up.  She don’t realize what she’s saying.  I’ll run up to her room and reason with her.  Don’t mind what a girl says in a tantrum, Mr. Britt,” Mrs. Harnden pleaded.

Mr. Britt, left with the father, began to stride back and forth across the room.  The title of the book jeered up at him from the carpet where he had tossed the volume; he kicked the book under the table.

“The wife said a whole lot just now,” affirmed Mr. Harnden, soothingly.  “Consider where the girl has been this evening, Tasper!  Off elocuting dramatic stuff!  Comes back full of high-flown nonsense.  Gets off something that was running in her head.  Torched on by that fly-by-night who’ll be getting out of town and who’ll be forgotten inside a week.  Where’s your optimism?” He reached up and slapped Britt’s back when the banker passed him.

“She is in love with him,” complained the suitor; his anger was succeeded by woe; his face “squizzled” as if he were about to weep a second time that day.

“Piffle!  She’s a queer girl if she didn’t have the usual run of childish ailments, along with the whooping cough and the measles.  I have always known how to manage my womenfolks, Tasper.  Not by threats and by tumulting around as you have been doing!  You’ve got a lot to learn.  Listen to me!”