The people went away interested. An agent or two who had hovered tirelessly about the place all day, succeeded, in spite of government regulations, in taking a few orders for their goods on exhibition, and Billy was satisfied with the day’s work. He knew that if one improvement came into actual use in the district others would follow. When the last car had gone he had a scrub up at the spring, made the best of his disordered appearance and went to the house to find Ruth. Notwithstanding the success of the day’s proceedings he had a heavy sense of disappointment. After all, the whole scheme had been inspired by a personal object, and that had failed. To-morrow he would be able to think of some new tack, of course, but to-night he welcomed the buoyant philosophy and sympathetic interest that always seemed to go with Ruth.
He found her in the kitchen helping the farmer’s wife with the supper. It was a repast fitting a day’s strenuous work out of doors—a great iron kettle of sizzling fried potatoes, a cold roast chicken reserved from the weekly market supply, a platter piled with steaming ears of corn, and deep, brown-skinned pumpkin pies. The doors were open and a crackling wood fire warmed the frost-edged air of the October evening. He found an old instinct stirred strangely by something in the genuine home atmosphere of the place. He couldn’t tell whether it was the motherly air of the woman who directed things, or the way the littlest sleepy towhead burrowed into his father’s shoulder, or whether the spell was partly due to the rose-shaded light falling about the girl with her silky, dark hair and glowing eyes. They were not at all practised in magnetic arts, those eyes; they were just frank and kind and happy and rather beautiful, he thought—the light might have been responsible. He had a boyish desire to tell her what troubled him—not definitely, of course; he had a masculine, cautious dislike of personalities, but if he could give her the abstract problem, he might at least get the benefit of a woman’s viewpoint. He had to take her to the station that night and he would drive around by the hill.
The mountain road was beautifully winding. For a stretch the trees arched over, leaving it cut like a black tunnel through the woods; then the rocks shot up a steep wall on one side and on the other a rain-washed slope ran down to a level of flat, tilled fields. At the crown of the hill the woods ended and a plateau of cleared land marked the beginning of the farm.
The car stopped abruptly.
“Do you know,” Billy began with animation, “I’ve always thought I’d like to own this place. What do you think of it? I’ve gone over every foot of it and I know it’s a good investment—that it would give a good living at least. Do you think it could ever be made a good place to live?”
Ruth looked at the crumbling house with its background of old trees. She remembered how the maple had flamed in the sun when she saw it from her window that morning. Now with the shadows lying sharp and black on the frosted grass and the moonlight filtering through the branches, it seemed to stand waiting for something to shelter and protect—rather a curious old sentinel too; wondering just what loves and trials and heart breaks would be lived out in the house to be. Suddenly she came to, remembering that he had asked if she thought the place could be made livable.
“Why not?” she said.
“Well—it’s twelve miles from the city——”
“You’d have a car. Why would you want it nearer the city?”
“I wouldn’t. I just wondered——. I want to build a house like a Swiss chalet, low and brown with a little corner tower for a sunroom, and a stone foundation just piling up naturally out of the ground, and a stone chimney with a fireplace as wide as a cave, where a person could dream the wildest kind of dreams and then live them. You can hear the creek roaring over the hill; there’s enough water power there to run a factory, and the house could be made pretty snug, I think; but sometimes I’m afraid I’ve just let myself be carried away with a vision—east is east, and the country will never make a good imitation of the town. You have lived in the city, and you know the country pretty well. Do you think this could be made a place where—well, where anyone not used to country life would be happy?”