The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until late that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not knocked on the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walk that the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own brain. “She's a nice woman,” he had said to himself over and over during the walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept away all possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got home and went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country and her brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who came out of her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women carry something heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The farmer brother had given Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of the mother and daughter standing together downstairs and was unspeakably glad he had not given way to his impulse toward boldness. “She would be telling her now. She is a good woman and would be telling her now,” he thought.
At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the conviction that women were not for him, he had found himself unable to sleep. Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she struggled with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him and he got up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the sky and the night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy. She was dressed in a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Pike to the place where George Pike the station master lived with his wife. Without giving himself time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with his long arm reached across the space between the two windows. His fingers had almost touched the back of the woman's head and ached to play in the mass of red hair that fell down over her shoulders, when again self-consciousness overcame him. He drew his arm quickly back and stood upright in the room. His head banged against the ceiling and he heard the window of the room next door go softly down. With a conscious effort he took himself in hand. “She's a good woman. Remember, she's a good woman,” he whispered to himself, and when he got again into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of the school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he still had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. “You tend to your business and don't be going off on that road any more,” he said, as though speaking to another person. “Remember she's a good woman and you haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't the right,” he added with a ring of command in his voice.
CHAPTER XIII
Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle factory. The three got out of Tom's buggy and came into the shop to see Hugh's new invention, the hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named Alfred Buckley went to the rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed in a light summer gown and her cheeks were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench near an open window and listened while she talked of how much the town had changed in the three years she had been away. “It is your doing, every one says that,” she declared.
Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began asking questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. “When everything is done by machines, what are people to do?” she asked. She seemed to take it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply on the subject of industrial development, a subject on which Kate Chanceller had often talked during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh spoken of as one who had a great brain, she wanted to see the brain at work.
Alfred Buckley came often to her father's house and wanted to marry Clara. In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and talked of the town and the big things that were to be done there. They spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow with a long jaw and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City, suggested schemes for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan on foot to get control of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve Hunter.
The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry him and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal thing, not at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a partner for life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined upon marriage. The New York man was at her father's house several evenings every week. She had never walked about with him nor had they in any way come close to each other. He seemed too much occupied with work to be personal and had proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara got the letter from the post-office and it upset her so that she felt she could not for a time go into the presence of any one she knew. “I am unworthy of you, but I want you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am new here and you do not know me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my merit. I want you to be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me so great an honor I feel I must prove myself worthy,” the letter said.
Clara had driven into town alone on the day when she received it and later got into her buggy and drove south past the Butterworth farm into the hills. She forgot to go home to lunch or to the evening meal. The horse jogged slowly along, protesting and trying to turn back at every cross road, but she kept on and did not get home until midnight. When she reached the farmhouse her father was waiting. He went with her into the barnyard and helped unhitch the horse. Nothing was said, and after a moment's conversation having nothing to do with the subject that occupied both their minds, she went upstairs and tried to think the matter out. She became convinced that her father had something to do with the proposal of marriage that he knew about it and had waited for her to come home in order to see how it had affected her.