the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway
stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore
a crisp percale shirt waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent
silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points
to them.

They were in the very heart of Wallach's Grove, under a natural
cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions
of soda-water and beer bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet.
He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picknickers'
immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated
very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to
reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him.

"Tickle-tickle!" she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal
spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig.

He caught at her hand.

"Hester," he said, "marry me."

She felt a foaming through her until her finger tips sang.

"Well, I like that!" was what she said, though, and flung up a pointed
profile that was like that same gazelle's smelling the moon.

He was very darkly red, and rose to his knees to clasp her about the
waist. She felt like relaxing back against his blondness and feeling her
fingers plow through the great double wave of his hair. But she did not.

"You're too poor," she said.

He sat back without speaking for a long minute.

"Money isn't everything," he said, finally, and with something gone from
his voice.

"I know," she said, looking off; "but it's a great deal if you happen to
want it more than anything else in the world."

"Then, if that's how you feel about it, Hester, next to wanting you, I
want it, too, more than anything else in the world."

"There's no future in bookkeeping."

"I know a fellow in Cincinnati who's a hundred-and-fifty-dollar man.
Hester? Dear?"

"A week?"

"Why, of course not, dear--a month!"

"Faugh!" she said, still looking off.

He felt out for her hand, at the touch of her reddening up again.

"Hester," he said, "you're the most beautiful, the most exciting, the
most maddening, the most--the most everything girl in the world!
You're not going to have an easy time of it, Hester, with your--your
environment and your dangerousness, if you don't settle down--quick,
with some strong fellow to take care of you. A fellow who loves you.
That's me, Hester. I want to make a little home for you and protect you.
I can't