In others it would have been half-heartedness.
In Squire Phin it was fixity of purpose and the steady loyalty of a firm, pure, true love that could wait.
Down in Smyrna the summer visitors still listen with mingled emotions to the story of the loves of Moses Britt and Xoa Emerson.
After they became engaged Moses worked for eight years accumulating enough money to buy three-eights of a fishing schooner. Xoa toiled at housework in various families, picked blueberries for the canning factory, and, by any employment that came to her hand, earned and saved for the little home that they had planned.
“We won’t get married till we can have our house built and furnished and ready to step into,” was the mark they had set thriftily for themselves.
The house went up, so old Mell Cowallis remarked, like the way “Figger-Four” Avery walked—steady by jerks: one year the foundation, another year the side walls and roof, a third year the chimneys and the lathing and clapboards—and so on for successive seasons, according as the fishing prospered and the work-stained fingers of Xoa tucked away the clinking change and the worn dollar bills.
Now it came to the time when Xoa resolved to fulfill the dream of her life and have a bow window of ample dimensions, the model of the one on Sheriff Morton’s big house, where she had worked for years in the kitchen, envying all the time the luxurious ease of the sheriff’s wife lolling on a divan in the window. But this window meant postponing the marriage a year, and with the house so nearly completed Moses had begun to express an entirely natural anxiety to get married.
Xoa, with the bow window filling her vision, could not understand this sudden haste in one who had been always as philosophic over delays as she herself.
“You think more of your old bow winder than you do of me,” cried Moses, in sudden jealousy. And he sailed away on a trip to the Banks, biting his stubbly gray beard in pique.
And ere one week had gone a legacy came to Xoa from her aunt Persis—just enough of a legacy to put on that bow window. So she hired carpenters in haste and set them at work, determined to have her way before the return of Moses. On one evening when the expanse of glass in that window was glowing redly in the beams of the setting sun, the “Xoa and Laura” sailed up the reach with her flag at half mast, and reported the loss of Moses Britt and his dory mate, smashed under in a fog by a roaring steamship.