Silas looked on and chuckled.
“Didn’t take ’em long,” he remarked to Liza Ann, and when as usual his wife did not reply, he added: “Glad we’re to have ’em for neighbours. She’s about th’ liveliest meadow lark on these prairies, an’ if she don’t sing on a fence post it’s ’cause she ain’t built that way, an’ can’t; she’s full enough to.”
Susan Hornby looked on and had her misgivings. She saw the devotion the young man poured out at her darling’s feet, and she knew that it was the fervour of the courting time in a man’s life that made him abandon his own interests and plans while he plumed himself and pursued his desired mate. She saw the rapturous, dreamy look of love and mating time in Elizabeth’s eyes, and she knew that the inevitable had happened, but she was not content. Premonitions which she sought to strangle shook her whenever the pair wandered away on real or fictitious errands. She saw that no word of love had yet been spoken, but every look cried it aloud and the day could not be far distant.
Between corn planting and corn plowing the foundations of the new house had been laid and work on it had progressed fitfully and whenever the young man could find time to help the occasional mason who laid brick and stone for simple foundations, and who had crops of his own to tend between times. The work had progressed slowly, but at last the wall had been finished and the carpenters had come to do their share. It gave excuse for many trips in the evening twilight. They usually went on horseback, and Silas’s pony with Liza Ann’s sidesaddle on its back had more business on hand that month than in all the other years of its lazy existence.
Susan Hornby watched the pair ride away one evening the first week in June. Nathan stood at her side on the doorstep.
“Of course he loves her; how could he help it? and yet——”
“And yet, what?” Nathan asked impatiently. “She wants him, an’ he wants her, an’ you stand there lookin’ as if that wasn’t enough.”
Susan Hornby turned to her husband with some uncertainty regarding his comprehension of the subject, and with a gentle patience with his mood. Nathan was often impatient of late.
“Yes, I know—only it seems as if——”
“Well, now what’s lacking?” her husband asked when she again broke off the sentence doubtfully. “He’s got a good farm, an’ he needs a wife to help him run it. From what he says, his mother’s too old t’ be of any help. He can’t run it alone, an’ seems t’ me it’s a good thing for both of ’em.”