And very frankly, with no vein of coquetry, she told him:
“I was afraid of you.”
This was incredible. Whatever feeling anyone might have had regarding him, he was sure no one had ever been afraid of him. And she, of all people! Why, the truth was, he was appallingly afraid of her, himself, only he would have called it by another name. It was the thing that made his touch fearful of crushing her feathers, that a poet would say “kept the soul of him kneeling” in her presence. Then the wonder of it dawned on him. Surely she didn’t care that way!
He hadn’t learned that there was no other way.
CHAPTER XVI.
“God’s outposts are the little homes.”
So much can happen between the kindling of fires in hearts and on the hearth of a new household. It is such a shy, questioning, never-to-be-repeated time, filled with the anxiety to understand, and the keener anxiety of holding the mirror to one’s own soul to better see its appalling unworthiness.
“The house must be ready by fall,” Billy said. “I’ll have the men at it in the morning.”
“But they’ll want boards and plans and stones, and lots of things,” his wife-to-be protested. “They’ll know you’re going to get married, and if they aren’t too sorry for you, I’m afraid they’ll laugh at you.”
“They can start digging the cellar, anyway. Surely they’ll have sense enough to know that any house has to have a cellar. Could—couldn’t we make some kind of plan to-night—something for them to begin on? From March to October is a long time to wait. It might make it seem a little nearer just to get it on paper.”