At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.

Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time.
Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man
muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be
interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.

Martin Eckles smiled: "The love birds must have been a little ruffled."

And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing
before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't
appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone
to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a
chair beside Calvin.

"Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away," she told him;
"before ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just
crazy to take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place."

"It's what you promised for," Calvin reminded her; "nothing's turned up
you didn't know about."

"If I did!" she exclaimed irritably. "What else is a girl to do, I'd
like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only
it'll be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I
hate to cook!" she cried. "And it makes me sick to put my hands in
greasy dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I
told Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't
help it if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see
a person go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt