"Will you forgive?" he asked, in a low voice.
"Then," he went on, smiling, "you must invite me to be your guest. When I look at that partridge, Miss Jocelyn, hunger makes me shameless. I want a second-joint--indeed I do!"
Her sensitive lips trembled into a smile, but she could not meet his eyes yet.
"Our Thanksgiving dinner would horrify you," she said--"a pickerel taken on a gang-hook, woodcock shot in Brier Brook swales, and this partridge--" She hesitated.
"And that partridge a victim to his own rash passion for winter grapes," added Gordon, laughing.
"I could make a chestnut stuffing," she said, timidly.
Something in her eyes held his, then he answered with heightened color, "I am very serious, Miss Jocelyn. May I come?"
She said "Yes" under her breath. There was color enough in her lips and cheeks now.
So young Gordon went away across the hills, whistling his dogs cheerily on, the sunlight glimmering on the slanting barrels of his gun. They looked back twice. The third time she looked he was gone beyond the brown hill's crest.
She came to her own door all of a tremble. Old man Jocelyn sat sunning his gray head on the south porch, lean hands folded over his stomach, pipe between his teeth.
"Daddy," she said, "look!" and she held up the partridge. Jocelyn smiled.
All the afternoon she was busy in the kitchen, and when the early evening shadows lengthened across the purple hills she stood at the door, brown eyes searching the northern slope.
The early dusk fell over the alder swales; the brawling brook was sheeted with vapor.
Up-stairs she heard her father dressing in his ancient suit of rusty black and pulling on his obsolete boots. She stole into the dining-room and looked at the table. Three covers were laid.
She had dressed in her graduating gown--a fluffy bit of white and ribbon. Her dark soft hair was gathered simply; a bunch of blue gentian glimmered at her belt.
Suddenly, as she lingered over the table, she heard Gordon's step on the porch, and the next instant her father came down the dark stairway into the dining-room just as Gordon entered.
The old man halted, eyes ablaze. But Gordon came forward gravely, saying, "I asked Miss Jocelyn if I might come as your guest to-night. It would have been a lonely Thanksgiving at home."