"Oh, you must really take one at a time, you know," asserted Louise.
"It's the only proper way."
"Then I'll start on thet dark-eyed one thet's a sewin'," he said,
slowly.
Beth looked up from her work and smiled.
"Go ahead, Mr. Clark," she said, encouragingly. "My name is Beth. Had
you forgotten it?"
"Call me Skim," he said, gently.
"Very well, Skim,--Now look here, Patsy Doyle, if you're going to sit
there and giggle you'll spoil everything. Mr. Clark wants to court, and
it's getting late."
"P'raps I've went fur enough fer tonight," remarked Skim, uneasily.
"Next time they'll leave us alone, an' then----"
"Oh, don't postpone it, please!" begged Beth, giving the boy a demure
glance from her soft brown eyes. "And don't mind my cousins. I don't."
"These things kain't be hurried," he said. "Si Merkle courted three
weeks afore he popped. He tol' me so."
"Then he was a very foolish man," declared Patsy, positively. "Just look
at Beth! She's dying to have you speak out. What's the use of waiting,
when she knows why you are here?"
By this time Skim had been flattered to the extent of destroying any
stray sense he might ever have possessed. His utter ignorance of girls
and their ways may have been partly responsible for his idiocy, or his
mother's conviction that all that was necessary was for him to declare
himself in order to be accepted had misled him and induced him to
abandon any native diffidence he might have had.
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