He always walked home with her from evening meetings and was her partner in the games at quilting parties . It was great fun for the young folks . `` Old Jerome and Anne '' were a standing joke in Deep Meadows . But the older people had ceased to expect anything to come of it . Anne laughed at Jerome as she had always done , and would not have owned for the world that she could have missed him . Jerome was useful , she admitted , and a comfortable friend ; and she would have liked him well enough if he would only omit that ridiculous yearly ceremony of proposal . It was Jerome 's fortieth birthday when Anne refused him again . He realized this as he went down the road in the moonlight , and doubt and dismay began to creep into his heart . Anne and he were both getting old -- there was no disputing that fact . It was high time that he brought her to terms if he was ever going to . Jerome was an easy-going mortal and always took things placidly , but he did not mean to have all those fifteen years of patient courting go for nothing He had thought Anne would get tired of saying no , sooner or later , and say yes , if for no other reason than to have a change ; but getting tired did not seem to run in the Stockard blood . She had said no that night just as coolly and decidedly and unsentimentally as she said it fifteen years before . Jerome had the sensation of going around in a circle and never getting any further on . He made up his mind that something must be done , and just as he got to the brook that divides Deep Meadows West from Deep Meadows Central an idea struck him ; it was a good idea and amused him . He laughed aloud and slapped his thigh , much to the amusement of two boys who were sitting unnoticed on the railing of the bridge . `` There 's old Jerome going home from seeing Anne Stockard , '' said one . `` Wonder what on earth he 's laughing at . Seems to me if I could n't get a wife without hoeing a fifteen-year row , I 'd give up trying . '' But , then , the speaker was a Hamilton , and the Hamiltons never had any perseverance . Jerome , although a well-to-do man , owning a good farm , had , so to speak , no home of his own .
The old Irving homestead belonged XXXXX his older brother , who had a wife and family .
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