“Oh,” says I, “I’m sorry I’ve ever been sharp with her.”

“I don’t know,” said Stephen. “’Ta’n’t in human nature not to pity her; but then she brought her own trouble on herself, you see.”

“Yes,” said I.

“I don’t know how to blast rocks,” says Stephen, when we’d walked a little while without saying anything,—­“but I suppose there is something as desperate that I can do.”

“Oh, you needn’t go to threatening me!” thinks I; and, true enough, he hadn’t any need to.

“Emmie,” says he, “if you say ‘No,’ when I ask you to have me, I sha’n’t ask you again.”

“Well?” says I, after a step or two, seeing he didn’t speak.

“Well?” says he.

“I can’t say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ either, till you ask me,” said I.

He stopped under the starlight and looked in my eyes.

“Emmie,” says he, “did you ever doubt that I loved you?”

“Once I thought you did,” said I; “but it’s different now.”

“I do love you,” said he, “and you know it.”

“Me, Stephen?” said I,—­“with my face like a speckled sparrow’s egg?”

“Yes, you,” said he; and he bent down and kissed me, and then we walked on.

By-and-by Stephen said, When would I come and be the life of his house and the light of his eyes?  That was rather a speech for Stephen; and I said, I would go whenever he wanted me.  And then we went home very comfortably, and Stephen told mother it was all right, and mother and Lurindy did what they’d got very much into the habit of doing,—­cried; and I said, I should think I was going to be buried, instead of married; and Stephen took my knitting-work away, and said, as I had knit all our trouble and all our joy into that thing, he meant to keep it just as it was; and that was the end of my knitting sale-socks.

I suppose, now I’ve told you so far, you’d maybe like to know the rest.  Well, Lurindy and John were married Thanksgiving morning; and just as they moved aside, Stephen and I stepped up and took John and Aunt Mimy rather by surprise by being married too.

“Wal,” says Aunt Mimy, “ef ever you hang eout another red flag, ’t won’t be because Lurindy’s nussin’ Stephen!”

I don’t suppose there’s a happier little woman in the State than me.  I should like to see her, if there is.  I go over home pretty often; and Aunt Mimy makes just as much of my baby—­I’ve named him John—­as mother does; and that’s enough to ruin any child that wasn’t a cherub born.  And Miss Mimy always has a bottle of some new nostrum of her own stilling every time she sees any of us; we’ve got enough to swim a ship, on the top shelf of the pantry to-day, if it was all put together.  As for Stephen, there he comes now through the huckleberry-pasture, with the baby on his arm; he seems to think there never was a baby before; and sometimes—­Stephen’s such a homebody—­I’m tempted to think that maybe I’ve married my own shadow, after all.