The rise in three successive numbers from “cottage” to “mansion” is perhaps sufficient to indicate that the Fosdick summer home was to be, as Issachar Price described it, “Some considerable house! Yes sir, by crimus, some considerable!”
In June, Helen came home for a week. At the end of the week she left to take up her new duties at the summer camp for girls in Vermont. Albert and she were together a good deal during that week. Anticipating her arrival, the young man's ardent imagination had again fanned what he delighted to think of as his love for her into flame. During the last months of the winter he had not played the languishing swain as conscientiously as during the autumn. Like the sailor in the song “is 'eart was true to Poll” always, but he had broken away from his self-imposed hermitage in his room at the Snow place several times to attend sociables, entertainments and, even, dances. Now, when she returned he was eagerly awaiting her and would have haunted the parsonage before and after working hours of every day as well as the evening, if she had permitted, and when with her assumed a proprietary air which was so obvious that even Mr. Price felt called upon to comment on it.
“Say, Al,” drawled Issachar, “cal'late you've cut out Eddie Raymond along with Helen, ain't ye? Don't see him hangin' around any since she got back, and the way you was actin' when I see you struttin' into the parsonage yard last night afore mail time made me think you must have a first mortgage on Helen and her pa and the house and the meetin'-house and two-thirds of the graveyard. I never see such an important-lookin' critter in MY life. Haw, haw! Eh? How 'bout it?”
Albert did not mind the Price sarcasm; instead he felt rather grateful to have the proletariat recognize that he had triumphed again. The fly in his ointment, so to speak, was the fact that Helen herself did not in the least recognize that triumph. She laughed at him.
“Don't look at me like that, please, please, don't,” she begged.
“Why not?” with a repetition of the look.
“Because it is silly.”
“Silly! Well, I like that! Aren't you and I engaged? Or just the same as engaged?”
“No, of course we are not.”
“But we promised each other—”