And Ambrose's face quivered in its old sympathetic fashion. "Course I will," he almost added "honey," but stopped himself in time. "Ef you and I can set a while on this bench by the door I wouldn't be a mite surprised ef we couldn't think up some way to make livin' in 'Pennyrile' a heap more of a laughin' matter for you."
AFTER this it was extraordinary the number of absolutely unassailable reasons that kept Ambrose so frequently on his way back and forth from the village to the school-house. Certainly twenty-four hours rarely passed without his getting up a wholly new idea to assist Miss Dunham, and therefore Miner, about which it was necessary to ask her advice. And possibly Emily encouraged him in this, for often she had postponed or put aside a perfectly good suggestion with the proposition that they talk the question over later, and that Ambrose come out again to the log cabin to see if they were of the same mind.
Of course Ambrose was extremely particular not to permit the hours of his visits to conflict with those of his partner, but as Miner no longer spent his evenings with him, naturally he concluded that these evenings were devoted to Emily, and therefore his appearances were usually made during the long summer twilight. And this not with any idea of hiding or of disloyalty, but simply that he should not be in his friend's way; for Ambrose's heart was singularly light these days and the sun shone with its old glory. Why, even the one little cloud that had troubled him for a while had been with laughter pushed away. On his mind during the first of his two or three visits had been the thought that Miss Dunham could not know of his presence in the midnight raid.
They were in the woods together one evening, a little beyond the papaw thicket, when Ambrose, thrusting his hand into his pocket, drew forth a carefully wrapped up package. "It ain't a present; it's yours already," he announced, pushing it toward Emily with his face crimsoning, and digging his toes into the earth like a big, awkward boy.
Slowly the girl unfolded her lost hairbrush, and, though her eyes immediately shone with laughter, womanlike she kept her lids down, asking with a kind of over-emphasized wonder, "How on earth, Mr. Ambrose Thompson, could you ever have come upon my hairbrush?"