Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/190

stopped because I didn't know what would please you most for me to write. Perhaps you'd like to know about the books Mr. Barton told me to get. I got them in Savannah, and am reading them outloud to him, so I'll get to pronounce words the way the man who wears your ring should. Rebecca, there never was any piece of gold meant so much as that to me. That college money under the shed didn't mean so much. I showed it to Mr. Barton. He's a fine fellow. We talk a lot. He tells me how to make myself more worthy of wearing your ring. Rebecca, it doesn't seem true—all that's happened between you and me. Nights when I lie in my dark hole below, smelling strong of kerosene oil from a smoky lantern, and creaking as the old 'Ellen T.' rises and falls, and listen to the snores of two big greasy Portuguese next to me, I just think you and your pretty white kid gloves aren't true, and then I feel around on the ribbon round my neck till I find the ring, and then I know it has really happened, and that we really have said good-by like married people do. And holding your ring like that I get to thinking of you. But not there. I take you out, Rebecca, where it's clean and sweet, underneath the stars, where we can be alone, like at the movies. Sometimes you're in your white ruffles, like when we played checkers, and sometimes you've got your gloves off and you're in your bare hands, like that time at the movies, and sometimes I see your little slender ankles, gray and velvety and delicate like a deer's up in the Maine woods. And I see your hat off, and your uncovered forehead, and it just seems as if I couldn't stand it any more. And I get up and walk and walk, and wish I was like