CHAPTER VIII

It was not a romantic wooing, and Asaph was not offering the first love Asaph was not offering the first love of a bachelor heart. He was a trade-broken widower with a series of assorted orphans on his hands. And his declaration was dragged out of him by jealousy and fear.

Jim Crawford, after numerous failures to decoy Deborah, had at last offered her the position of head saleswoman; this included not only authority and increase of pay, but two trips a year to New York as buyer!

Deborah's soul hungered to make that journey before she died, but she put even this temptation from her as an ingratitude to Asaph. Still, when Asaph called the next evening it amused her to tell him that she was going to transfer herself to Crawford's-just to see what he would say and to amuse him. Her trifling joke brought a drama down on her head.

Asaph turned pale, gulped: "You're going to leave me, Deborah! Why, I-I couldn't get along without you. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't talk to you all the time. Jim Crawford's in love with you, the old scoundrel! But I won't let you marry him. I got a nicer house than what he has for you to live in, too. There's the childern, of course, but you like childern. They'd love you. They need mothering something awful. I been meaning to ask you to marry me, but I was afraid to. But I couldn't let you go. You won't, will you? I want you should marry me-right off. You will, won't you?"

Deborah stared at him agape. Then she cried: "Asaph Shillaber, are you proposing to me or quarreling with me-which?"

"I'm proposin' to you, darn it, and I won't take 'No' for an answer."

Deborah had often wondered what she would say if the impossible should happen and a man should ask for her hand. And now it had come in the unlikeliest way, and what she said was:

"Sakes alive! Ase, one of us must be crazy!"

Asaph was in a panic; and he besieged and besought till she told him she would think it over. The sensation was too delicious to be finished with an immediate monosyllable. He went away blustering. Her mother had slept through the cataclysm. Deborah postponed telling her, and went to her room in a state of ecstatic distress.

Her room was prettier than it had been, and the bureau was more bravely equipped. It was a place of interesting mystery; there were curling-irons and skin-foods and nail-powders, and what not?

Now she was asked to give up this loneliness, this lifelong privacy, with its blessing and its bane, to move over into a man's house and share his room and her life with him.

Only, now she was asked this at the period when many women were returning to a second spinstership and one of her friends, who had married young and whose daughter had married young, was a grandmother. Deborah was experiencing the terror that assails young brides, the dread of the profoundest revolution in woman's life. Only in her case the terror was the greater from the double duration of her maidenhood. She was still a girl, and yet gray was in her hair.

The thought of marriage was almost intolerably fearful, and yet it was almost intolerably beautiful.

How wonderful that she should be asked to marry the ideal of her youth-she, the laughing-stock of the other girls; and now she could have a husband, a home, and children of various ages, from the little tot to the grown-ups. She would never have babies of her own, she supposed, but she could acquire them ready-made. All her stifled domestic instincts flamed at the new empire offered her.

And then she remembered Josie and Josie's sneer: "Poor old Debby. She never was a rose."

And now Josie was dead a year and more, and Josie's children and Josie's lover were submitted to her to take or leave. What a revenge it would be! What a squaring of old accounts! How she would turn the laugh back on them! How well she could laugh who waited to the last!

Then she shook her head. What had she to do with revenge? What meaner advantage could anybody take than to flaunt a dead enemy's colors? We can all deal sharply with our friends, but we must be magnanimous with our foes.

No, it was impossible. Josie had suffered enough in the ebb of her beauty. Debby could not strike at her in her grave.

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