He looked down at her. "I love you, too," he said quickly. Then he looked away.
The horn sounded again: twenty after two in the morning, and still no sign of him. This is it, she thought. I'll give him until the next horn, and then...
She sighed again, and turned her thoughts back to him.
Bart was a sweet man, but - oh! - sometimes he could do the most appalling things. Like the time they were walking on their favorite path...
...they were walking along, and the sound of their passing had flushed out one of the small forest animals - a tiny mouse that didn't look old enough to be out on its own yet.
"Awww..." she had murmured. "How cute!"
He strode over to the mouse and raised a foot, dangling it over the terrified creature.
"Oh, darling," Emily scolded. "Don't tease the poor thing."
He chortled, a horrid-sounding laugh that she had never heard him use before.
"Oh, my dear, I have no intention of teasing it."
Then he brought his foot down heavily upon the mouse, crushing it instantly, and then he twisted his heel to grind the little corpse further into the dirt.
Her stomach heaved and she almost vomited. "My God, Bart! Why did you do that?"
A strange, almost relaxed look passed across his face. "Well, my mother always said that those things were dirty, and that's what she would've had me do - one less mouse in the world ..."
"Well, I'm not your mother," she said in disgust. She didn't talk to him for the rest of the walk, and she had very nearly decided to break it off with him that day.
But he had apologized for his behavior the next day and she forgave him.
"But don't ever let it happen again," she warned. He promised that it wouldn't, and it hadn't.
If it'd been anyone else but Bart, she wouldn't have given him that second chance, but he'd had a hard life - especially growing up. He had told her some of the things that had happened during his earlier years, and she wondered how he could have coped so well.
Any other man, she thought, surely would have turned bitter with that kind of treatment. But he hadn't and, among other things, she loved him for that.
After they had been seeing each other for a couple of months, the time had come (she felt) to introduce him to Daddy.
"Are you sure?" Bart had asked her.
Emily nodded. "He's beginning to get suspicious," she said. "If he finds out before we tell him, he'll never give us permission to get married."
"And why would we need that?" he asked. "We could just go ahead and do that on our own."
She giggled nervously. "What a strange sense of humor you have, darling."
After few seconds of awkward silence had passed, Bart laughed, too.
Daddy didn't seem to be surprised when she brought up the subject after supper that night.
"I thought there had to be a good reason for all those long walks," he smiled.
So it was arranged, and Bart came by for supper one Sunday night.
But it was a disaster, almost from the start. Daddy could be intimidating, and that night poor Bart got the worst of it, though he did manage to stumble through the meal and make a semi-dignified exit.
"I don't think your father likes me..." Bart had hissed to her on his way out.
"I'll talk to him," she promised. "He'll come around."
"Not very sociable, is he?" her father remarked as they watched their guest disappear.
"Oh, Daddy, Bart was just nervous," Emily said to him quietly, "and you were very hard on him."
"He's a grown man," her father growled. "You don't need to defend him."
Emily ignored his comment: she needed this chat to go well...
She waited for a few seconds - maybe a quarter-minute - and then blurted the question she could no longer hold back.
"So - what do you think of him?'' Emily asked, wringing her hands.
Her father paused and looked into the distance. "Do you want my honest opinion?" he asked.
"Of course I do," she said.
"I don't care for him," Daddy had said. ''Not one bit.''
Emily was shocked. And hurt. "But ... why not?"
He shook his head. "What do we know about him? What about his family?"
"But his family doesn't matter," she protested. "It'll be him I'd be marrying, not his family."
Her father's eyes narrowed. "A little soon to be talking marriage, don't you think?"
She blushed. "Well, not for awhile yet, of course. Not right away."
He continued. "And no one in town knows much about him. Don't you find that just a bit odd?"
Emily ignored that question - she had a more relevant one for him.
"But that's not entirely it, is it?" she asked. "There must be some good reason why you don't like him? When you've only met him once?"
He paused again, and a tense silence passed between them.
"Why?" she persisted.
A few more seconds went by, and then he answered.
"I don't like the way he cuts in and answers on your behalf whenever I ask you something ... I don't like how he evades direct questions. And I especially don't like what I see in his face," he said. "There's a shifty look about him - I don't trust him. Not with you..."
That was too much. "But, Daddy, you don't know him - and you can't judge a man by his ... his expression! You can't possibly know what you're talking about!"
Her father's face whitened and she felt a shiver run down her back.
"Indeed," he said icily, through clenched teeth. Then he turned on his heel and walked away - in the direction of the beach...
Emily blinked away the tears that had come suddenly to her eyes. Now he wouldn't be back for awhile, and the conversation - the one that she had so badly needed to go well - had turned out more disastrously than she could have imagined.
She quickly tidied up the supper dishes, went to bed early, and cried herself to sleep.
Bart was still furious when she caught up with him the next day
"I'll show him." he snapped. "Who does he think he is?"
She tried to sooth him. "But he means well, darling, he's just trying to look out for me…"
But that only got Bart angrier. "I really don't need this kind of bother," he continued, "Maybe we ought to quit seeing each other? Is that what you want?"
Her heart fluttered, and then dropped into her stomach. "No," she whispered.
His eyes narrowed and he leaned close to her. "Then, my dear, you have a problem," he said, and he stalked away.
Emily ground her teeth in frustration as she watched him leave. Men!
The trouble with Bart was that, like Daddy, he could be very stubborn. And very unreasonable…