That was in the earlier stage.  Later it dawned upon him that there never could be another time, and he didn’t want that there should.  This knowledge left him rather dazed.  He felt a good deal like a man who, walking across a pleasant beach and enjoying the view, suddenly finds himself up to his neck in quicksand.  And, like a person in such a quandary, Wade’s first instinctive thought was to struggle.

The struggle lasted three days, three days during which he sedulously avoided The Cedars and tramped dozens of miles with Zenas Third in search of fish—­and very frequently lost his bait because his thoughts were busy elsewhere.  At the end of the three days he found himself, to return to our comparison, deeper than ever.

Then it was that he looked facts in the face.  He reduced the problem to simple quantities and studied it all one evening, with the aid of an eighth of a pound of tobacco and a pile of lumber which the carpenters had left near the woodshed.  The problem, as Wade viewed it, was this: 

A man, with little to recommend him save money, is head over heels in love with the loveliest, dearest girl the Lord ever made, a girl a thousand times too good for the man, and who doesn’t care any more for him than she does for the family cat or the family doctor.  What’s the answer?

Wade gave it up—­the problem, not the girl.  He wasn’t good at problems.  Out West it had been Ed Craig who had figured out the problems on paper, and Wade who had reached the same conclusions with pick and shovel and dynamite.  Their methods differed, but the results attained were similar.  So, as I have said, Wade abandoned the problem on paper and set to work, metaphorically, with steel and explosives.

XII.

There was a bench outside the kitchen door at The Cedars, a slant-legged, unpainted bench which at one time had been used to hold milk-cans.  Wade settled himself on this in company with several dozen glasses of currant jelly.  From his position he could look in at the kitchen door upon Eve and Miss Mullett, who, draped from chin to toes in blue-checked aprons, were busy over the summer preserving.  A sweet, spicy fragrance was wafted out to him from the bubbling kettles, and now and then Eve, bearing a long agate-ware spoon and adorned on one cheek with a brilliant streak of currant juice, came to the threshold and smiled down upon him in a preoccupied manner, glancing at the jelly tumblers anxiously.

“If you spill them,” she said, “Carrie will never forgive you, Mr. Herrick.”

“Nonsense,” declared Miss Mullett from the kitchen.  “I’d just send you for more, Mr. Herrick, and make you help me put them up.”

“I think I’d like that,” answered Wade.

“It must be rather good fun messing about with sugar and currants and things.”

“Messing about!” exclaimed Eve, indignantly.  “It’s quite evident that you’ve never done any of it!”