Candace found her felt nodding in agreement, despite her annoyance at the man’s methods.

“It’s nice that he told you exactly what he wanted…” she said, slowly.

“I wish more guys would do that.”

The authoress gave a sage nod.

“This occurred to me as well,” she said. “As much as the man angered me with his manner, he was being extraordinarily forthcoming… unlike anyone else I’d ever met. And then he asked me a strange question… he said: I know you like this Ben character, but I want to know did he ask you to marry him?”

The breeze blew over the walkway and bench, making the brim of the writer’s hat move a little. Candace pushed her bangs out of her eye and waited for the woman to continue.

“I had to admit that he had not. Saying it was… difficult… for me. James kept my gaze the entire time; he didn't touch me again, but I felt comforted somehow by his presence. It was a strange feeling. James had more to say; he appeared to be relieved by my answer. He said: ‘well, I ‘masking to marry you. I like you; I think we’d even be happy together.Since this Ben is not here to contend with, I’m fairly certain I can win you over.”

The report had lost all interest in taking notes.

“What did you say?” she asked, eagerly.

“Nothing…I didn’t get a chance to speak. He just tossed out that sentence and got up; he walked right out of the room and left the library. Jane Eyre was completely forgotten, I can tell you.”

“Yeah, I bet!”

“I went home, and spoke with my father. He informed me that James had asked him for my hand in marriage a week earlier. I was dumbfounded…things like that happen in books, you know… ones written centuries ago.The fact that Ben had never even mentioned marriage suddenly became quite apparent. I had no tangible evidence that he even cared about me,merely a faint hope that he did. He’d never even said it. I did not get much sleep that night… in fact I cried a great deal.” The authoress sighed again; the sound of it filled Candace with a morose kind of sympathy. “I suppose I was mourning that night, weeping for dreams which had been slowly dying already.” The woman in the hat glanced at the couple down the path again. “You see, it was not that Ben wasn’t there… my soul is worked over with a stubborn sort of loyalty. It was misplaced in Ben; he was unworthy of it. His actions warranted no allocation of my precious affection be granted to him. That night, I decided that a literal James was worth more than a figurative Ben.”

The reported giggled softly at that and wrote it down.

“That’s a good one.”

“I thought so as well and the next morning I talked with my father about James. A good measure of character in his eyes was respect, and James had proved that by not only asking him for me, but in questioning my character, testing my loyalty. ‘It means he’s really interested in you,sweetie’, he told me. I walked along the creek for some hours that morning, just thinking. James was sitting on my parent’s porch when I returned.”

(Continued in comments below...)