Quaint Courtships Part 15

"Where is Mabel?" she asked, anxiously.

"She is having her hair done and her nails polished, I believe," said Decatur, gloomily, dropping down beside Jane. "She is being prepared, as nearly as I can gather, to receive a proposal of marriage."

"Ah! Then you--" She turned to him inquiringly.

"It appears so now," he admitted. "I have been talking to her mother."

"Oh, I see." She said it quietly, gently, in a tone of submission.

"But you don't see," he protested. "No one sees; that is, no one sees things as they really are. Do you think, Jane, that you could listen to me for a few moments without jumping at conclusions, without a.s.suming that you know exactly what I am going to say before I have said it?"

She said that she would try.

"Then I would like to make a confession to you."

"Wouldn't it be better to--to make it first to Mabel?"

"No, it would not," he declared, doggedly. "It concerns that interview in which I was quoted as saying things about gray-eyed girls."

"Yes, I read it. We all read it."

"I guessed that much. Well, I said those things, just as I was quoted as saying them, but I did not mean all that I was credited with meaning. I want you to believe, Jane, that when I admitted my preference for gray eyes and--and all that, I was thinking of one gray-eyed girl in particular. Can you believe that?"

"Oh, I did from the very first; that is, I did as soon as Aunt Judith--"

"Never mind about Aunt Judith," interrupted Decatur, firmly. "We will get to her in time. We are talking now about that interview. You must admit, Jane, that there are many gray-eyed girls in the country; I don't know just how many, thank Heaven, but there are a lot of them. And most of them seem not only to have read that interview, but to have made a personal application of my remarks. Have you any idea what that means to me?"

"Then you think that they are all in--"

"No, no! I don't imagine there's a single one that cares a bone b.u.t.ton for me. But each and every one of them thinks that I am in love with her, or willing to be. If she doesn't think so, her friends do. They expect me to propose on sight, simply because of what I have said about gray eyes. You doubt that? Let me tell you what occurred just before I left town: A person whom I had counted as a friend got together a whole houseful of gray-eyed girls, and then sent for me to come and make my choice. That is what drove me from the city. That is why I came to Ocean Park in June."

"But the one particular gray-eyed girl that you mentioned? How was it that you happened to--"

"It was sheer good fortune, Jane, that I found you here."

Decatur had slipped a tentative arm along the seat-back. He was leaning towards Jane, regarding her with melancholy tenderness.

"That you found me?" she said, wonderingly. "Oh, you mean that it was fortunate you found _us_ here?"

"No, I don't. I mean you--y-o-u, second person singular. Haven't you guessed by this time who was the particular gray-eyed girl I had in mind?"

"Of course I have; it was Mabel, wasn't it?"

"Mabel! Oh, hang Mabel! Jane, it was you."

"Me! Why, Decatur Brown!" Either surprise or indignation rang in her tone. He concluded that it must be the latter.

"Oh, well," he said, dejectedly, "I had no right to suppose that you'd like it. It's the truth, though, and after so much misunderstanding I am glad you know it. I want you to know that it was you who inspired Sunday Weeks, if any one did. I have never mentioned this before, have not admitted it, even to myself, until now. But I realize that it is true.

We have been a long time apart, but the memory of you has never faded for a day, for an hour. So, when I tried to describe the most charming girl of whom I could think, I was describing you. As I wrote, there was constantly before me the vision of your dear gray eyes, and--"

"Decatur! Look at me. Look me straight in the eyes and tell me if they are gray."

He looked. As a matter of fact, he had been looking into her eyes for several moments. Now there was something so compelling about her tone that he bent all his faculties to the task. This time he looked not with that blindness peculiar to those who love, but, for the moment, discerningly, seeingly. And they were not gray eyes at all. They were a clear, brilliant hazel.

"Why--why!" he gasped out, chokingly. "I--I have always thought of them as gray eyes."

"If that isn't just like a man!" she exclaimed, shrugging away from him.

Her quarter profile revealed those thinly curved lips pursed into a most delicious pout. "You acknowledge, don't you, that they're _not_ gray?"

she flung at him over her shoulder--an adorable shoulder, Decatur thought.

"Oh, I admit it," he groaned.

"Then--then why don't you go away?" It was just that trembling little quaver on the low notes which spurred him on to cast the die.

"Jane," he whispered, "I don't want to go away, and I don't want you to send me. It isn't gray eyes that I care for, or ever have cared for.

It's been just you, your own dear, charming self."

"No, it hasn't been. I haven't even a piquant chin."

"That doesn't matter. What is a piquant chin, anyway?"

"You ought to know; you wrote it."

"So I did, but I didn't know what it meant. I just knew that it ought to mean something charming, which you are."

"I'm not. And I am not accomplished. I don't sing, I don't play, I don't draw."

"Thanks be for that! I don't, either. But I think you are the dearest girl in the world."

At that she turned to him and smiled a little as only Jane could smile.

"You told me that once before, a long time ago, you know."

"And you have not forgotten?"

"No. I--you see--I didn't want to forget."

Had it been August, or even July, doubtless a great number of vacationists would have been somewhat shocked at what Decatur did then.

But it was early June, you remember, and on the far end of the Ocean Park fis.h.i.+ng-pier were only these two, with just the dancing blue ocean in front.

"But," she said at length, after many other and more important things had been said between them, "what will Aunt Judith say?"

"I suppose she'll think me a lucky dog--and slightly color-blind,"

chuckled Decatur, joyously. "But come," he went on, helping her to rise and retaining both her hands, swaying them back and forth clasped in his, as children do in the game of London Bridge,--"come," he repeated, impulsively, "while my courage is high let us go and break the news to your aunt Judith."

There was, however, no need. Looming ponderously in the middle distance of the pier's vista, a lorgnette held to her eyes, and a frozen look of horror on her ample features, was Aunt Judith herself.