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I'll show it to you when I come in." But Amarita pored over it by herself, and old Mis' Meade, at the window, knit and watched for the passing. It was a bright day, and it seemed reasonable that at least two wagons might go by. "Don't you want I should bring it over there," said Amarita, at length, "and let you look at it?"
He looked at her in complete discouragement, and Amarita returned his gaze with one bespeaking a conviction of her own innocence. "Don't ye know no better'n that? Take 'em away! All the takin' away he'll do'll be in a hog's eye. He'll say you bought 'em, and ain't paid for 'em, and 'long about the first o' the month he'll send in a bill for twelve books at a dollar and eighty-seven cents apiece."
If ever a woman was a fool over a man, she reasoned, Amarita was that fool; but in her heart she would not have had it otherwise. Now that the plans were virtually finished, Elihu sat over them at an hour's stretch, testing and measuring in an extreme of accuracy.
Elihu's as good a boy as ever stepped; but if he could be took down a peg an' I shouldn't care if 'twas before the whole township, too he'd be worth more by half than he is to-day. Law! you'd ought to seen him a hundred years ago or more, arter I gi'n him a good spankin'. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth." "Oh, don't! He's comin'," Amarita begged her.
It seemed a long time before she heard his voice. "There! there!" he was saying. "You open that door and I'll look in an' see if the chimbley's ketched." In a moment Amarita followed him. She heard mother Meade moving about the kitchen, and Elihu was just dropping his roll of paper on the fire.
"A dollar and eighty-seven cents!" he repeated. "You ain't gone and put your name down for twelve books, a dollar and eighty-seven cents apiece?" "Why, no," said Amarita. "Course I ain't. I didn't have the money, and so I told him. I would, in a minute, if I'd had it." "Well, what's the packin'-case here for?" inquired Elihu slowly, while his mind labored. "Why, he was possessed to leave it.
"Well," said Elihu, "we've talked it over, more or less, most on us, and we've come to the conclusion it's only a bill o' cost to go hirin' city architects to plan out the job. All we want's a good square house, and I thought I'd draw out a plan o' one and submit it to the meetin'." "O Elihu!" said Amarita, in a tone of generous awe. "You think you could?" "Think?" said Elihu. "No, I don't think.
She had never seemed to see them, but not one of them had escaped her. There was the day when a traveling salesman had sold him the onion seed that never came up, and the other one when he had bought Old White of the peddler, and seen him go lame after a two-mile drive, and when he dated a note on Sunday and the school-teacher had laughed. At first Amarita had not merely ignored his errors.
But he was not coming, and for an hour Amarita dwelt upon the plans. Her eyes grew bright and her cheeks flushed. Once she pushed her pretty hair back from her forehead and looked up at the old lady, as if she had impulsive things to say. But she did not speak, and turning back to the plans, she went absorbedly over them again. Old Mis' Meade watched her scornfully, and yet tenderly, too.
But as she moved back and forth at her tasks she watched him, and her eyes glittered. Old Mis' Meade noted the excitement of her air and the double tinge of color in her cheeks. "What's the matter, Rita?" she asked kindly, when Amarita stood for a moment by the table between the front windows, frowning with the care she was giving to sewing a button on a wristband. "Ain't you kinder feverish?"
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