Lovers are a strange animal.  I may be foolish, but I prefer toads.  With them you can tie a string around the hind leg, and you have got them.  But with lovers it’s all this way one day and upside down the next, and wondering what’s hurt the feelings of her, and if he’s got tired of you, and polyandering around to get interviews up rivers when you could easier sit on the piazza and talk—­and all such.  It seems to me that things would go a lot simpler if everybody would cut out most of the feelings department, and just eat their meals and look after their animals and play all they get time for, and then go to sleep quietly.  Fussing is such a depravity.  But they wouldn’t do what I said, not if I told them, so I lie low and think.

Next morning I harnessed the pony in the cart and said, “Peg—­take a drive with me—­come on,” and Peg looked grattyfied, and mother said I was a dear, thoughtful child, and grandma said it would do the girl good, and I was a noble lad.  So I got encombiums all round for once.  Only Aunt Elizabeth—­she looked thoughtful.

I rattled Hotspur—­that’s the pony—­out to the happy hunting-ground by the river, till I saw Dr. Denbigh’s gray cap behind a bush, and I rightly argued that his manly form was hitched onto it, for he arose up in his might as I stopped the cart.  Peggy gasped and said, “Oh—­oh!  We must go home.  Oh, Billy, drive on!” Which Billy didn’t do, not so you’d notice it.  Then the doctor said, in his I-am-the-Ten-Commandments manner, “Get out, Peggy,” and held his hand.

And Peggy said, “I won’t—­I can’t,” and immediately did, the goose.

Then he looked at me in a funny, fierce way he has, with his eyebrows away down, only you know he’s pleasant because his eyes jiggle.

“Billy, my son,” he said, “will you kindly deprive us of the light of your presence for one hour by the clock?  Here’s my timepiece—­one hour.  Go!” And he gave Hotspur a slap so he leaped.

Dr. Denbigh is the most different person from Harry Goward I know.

Well, I drove round by the Red Bridge, and was gone an hour and twelve minutes, and I thought they’d be missing me and in a fit to get home, so I just raced Hotspur the last mile.

“I’m awfully sorry I’m so late,” said I.  “I got looking at some pigs, so I forgot.  I’m sorry,” said I.

Peg looked up at me as if she couldn’t remember who I was, and inquired, wonderingly:  “Is it an hour yet?”

And Dr. Denbigh said, “Great Scott! boy, you needn’t have hurried!”

That’s lovers all over.

And they hadn’t finished yet, if you’ll believe me.  Dr. Denbigh went on talking as they stood up, just as if I wasn’t living.  “You won’t promise me?” he asked her.

And she said:  “Oh, Jack, how can I?  I don’t know what to do—­but I’m engaged to him—­that’s a solemn thing.”

“Solemn nonsense,” said the doctor.  “You don’t love him—­you never did—­you never could.  Be a woman, dearest, and end this wretched mess.”