"Like her! I love her--the unselfish, dear, good girl!" cried Tom. "Have you been jealous of Phyllis? Then you love me, Barbara. You couldn't be jealous unless you did! I did imagine once that of all the dear Wyndhams, Phyllis might be dearest; but it was a mistake. I saw straight after she was gone. I never loved her--not that way, Bab; I only fancied that I might. But I do love Phyllis so much that I want her for my cousin. Will you make her my cousin, Babbie?"
"She is much nicer than I," said Bab, very low, without raising her eyes, and clinging to her last moment of freedom.
"Bab, don't waste any more time; you have treated me badly enough, heaven knows, and I haven't enjoyed it. Tell me you love me, this instant," said Tom, in a tone which Barbara might have resented had not her recent fright and humiliation subdued her.
"I love you, Tom," she repeated meekly, and straightway forgot all doubt, all fear, in perfect happiness.
When Jessamy came home she nearly dropped in the doorway; for there was Bab throned in the window, looking radiantly pretty with the depth of joy and womanly sweetness the events of the afternoon had called into her face, and beside her, on a low stool, sat Tom, looking entirely blissful and unusually humble.
He sprang up as he saw Jessamy. "Come to your brother, Jessamy!" he cried. "Bab has promised to marry me."
"I have promised not to marry him," said Bab. "I have told him I will not so much as hear it spoken of for ages. As though I wanted to marry yet!"
But Jessamy waited to hear no more. She threw herself at Bab in some mysterious way, and hugged and kissed her sister--with a kiss for Tom, too--in almost hysterical rapture.
"It was pretty rough on me to be treated as I have been lately," said Tom, as they tried to settle down to sanity. "But I ought to have known what it meant; for the very first time I ever saw Bab, she threw herself at my feet, for me to pick up, or leave, as I chose."
"Why, Thomas Leighton!" cried Bab, indignantly.
"Fact, and you know it," affirmed Tom. "Never mind, Babbie; 'some falls are means the happier to rise,' you know. That fall of yours on the 'Blackboard' steps was one of them; for, my heart, aren't we happy!"
Two letters were despatched to Boston that night--one from Jessamy, one from Bab--like a duet chanted to Phyllis. The burden of one was, in brief, that the millennium had come upon earth, for Bab was so happy; and of the other: "Come home, come home!"