She thanked me quite readily, saying, "Well, if you will have it so, Gustave Fink," and gave me the sweetest smile.
I ran home in a tremor of delight, carrying her smile with me. It is a fact. Her smiling face was before me all the way.
Of course I told my linnet the news--how that Louisa had accepted my work, and paid me for it with the sweetest smile--and the bird sang gayly, and the rhythm and the tenderness of the song found an echo in my heart. Up to this point the linnet was my sole confidant. Not to another creature did I breathe my secret. None the less did I look upon myself as Louisa Wagner's accepted lover. After what had passed--which, as you see, I magnified into the most ridiculous importance--how could it be otherwise? I was satisfied, I was happy. That when I could find courage to speak plainly to her she would place her hand in mine, and permit me to touch her lips with mine, I entertained not the slightest doubt.
I was a proud young fellow the following Sunday when I saw her walking in the boots I had repaired for her, and which looked like new. She wore a new cotton dress, and a bit of new ribbon round her white throat, and I settled it in my mind that they were worn for me. No man has ever tasted a greater happiness than I did on that day. But I could not find courage to speak to Louisa of the love which made my heart like a garden of sweet flowers. I walked by her side and was contented.
Ah, how it all comes back to me! The meeting at the church door, the walk through the church-yard and the village till we came to her father's cottage, the stupid talk about the boots!
"I never felt so comfortable in my life," she said; "they are as easy as if I had worn them for years. And they do not make my feet look large."
Her feet look large! In my eyes they were the feet of a princess. Now, as she put out her foot, and I was gazing at it in a sort of rapture, who should come up to us but a neighbor of mine, a wheelwright, Steven Wolf by name.
I can see the picture as plainly as if it were bodily before me in the room. I turn towards the fire, and I see the picture there in the glowing coals.
"The prettiest foot in all the village," cried Steven Wolf, "and the prettiest mouth, and the loveliest eyes!"
His voice jarred upon me. It was like the voice of a brawler calling out in the church and interrupting the service. No wonder, I thought, that Louisa should blush as he gazed boldly at her. His look was a profanation. To save the girl I loved from further indignity I bade her good-bye and left her. Turning my head for a moment as I walked away, it pierced my heart like the thrust of a needle to see that Steven Wolf had followed her into her father's cottage.