A few minutes more and escape would be cut off -- yet she did not move . When the dark green water reached her , and the lapping wavelets swished up over the hem of her dress , she lifted her head and a sudden strange smile flashed over her face . Perhaps the kelpy understood it . The Way of the Winning of Anne Jerome Irving had been courting Anne Stockard for fifteen years . He had begun when she was twenty and he was twenty-five , and now that Jerome was forty , and Anne , in a village where everybody knew everybody else 's age , had to own to being thirty-five , the courtship did not seem any nearer a climax than it had at the beginning . But that was not Jerome 's fault , poor fellow ! At the end of the first year he had asked Anne to marry him , and Anne had refused . Jerome was disappointed , but he kept his head and went on courting Anne just the same ; that is he went over to Esek Stockard 's house every Saturday night and spent the evening , he walked home with Anne from prayer meeting and singing school and parties when she would let him , and asked her to go to all the concerts and socials and quilting frolics that came off . Anne never would go , of course , but Jerome faithfully gave her the chance . Old Esek rather favoured Jerome 's suit , for Anne was the plainest of his many daughters , and no other fellow seemed at all anxious to run Jerome off the track ; but she took her own way with true Stockard firmness , and matters were allowed to drift on at the will of time or chance . Three years later Jerome tried his luck again , with precisely the same result , and after that he had asked Anne regularly once a year to marry him , and just as regularly Anne said no a little more brusquely and a little more decidedly every year . Now , in the mellowness of a fifteen-year-old courtship , Jerome did not mind it at all . He knew that everything comes to the man who has patience to wait . Time , of course , had not stood still with Anne and Jerome , or with the history of Deep Meadows . At the Stockard homestead the changes had been many and marked . Every year or two there had been a wedding in the big brick farmhouse , and one of old Esek 's girls had been the bride each time . Julia and Grace and Celia and Betty and Theodosia and Clementina Stockard were all married and gone . But Anne had never had another lover . There had to be an old maid in every big family she said , and she was not going to marry Jerome Irving just for the sake of having Mrs. on her tombstone . Old Esek and his wife had been put away in the Deep Meadows burying-ground .
The broad , fertile Stockard acres passed into XXXXX 's possession .
Anne Irving Jerome Meadows Stockard minutes quilting wavelets year years