As soon as the fall planting was done, Claude got the well borers out from town to drill his new well, and while they were at work he began digging his cellar.  He was building his house on the level stretch beside his father’s timber claim because, when he was a little boy, he had thought that grove of trees the most beautiful spot in the world.  It was a square of about thirty acres, set out in ash and box-elder and cotton-woods, with a thick mulberry hedge on the south side.  The trees had been neglected of late years, but if he lived up there he could manage to trim them and care for them at odd moments.

Every morning now he ran up in the Ford and worked at his cellar.  He had heard that the deeper a cellar was, the better it was; and he meant that this one should be deep enough.  One day Leonard Dawson stopped to see what progress he was making.  Standing on the edge of the hole, he shouted to the lad who was sweating below.

“My God, Claude, what do you want of a cellar as deep as that?  When your wife takes a notion to go to China, you can open a trap-door and drop her through!”

Claude flung down his pick and ran up the ladder.  “Enid’s not going to have notions of that sort,” he said wrathfully.

“Well, you needn’t get mad.  I’m glad to hear it.  I was sorry when the other girl went.  It always looked to me like Enid had her face set for China, but I haven’t seen her for a good while,—­not since before she went off to Michigan with the old lady.”

After Leonard was gone, Claude returned to his work, still out of humour.  He was not altogether happy in his mind about Enid.  When he went down to the mill it was usually Mr. Royce, not Enid, who sought to detain him, followed him down the path to the gate and seemed sorry to see him go.  He could not blame Enid with any lack of interest in what he was doing.  She talked and thought of nothing but the new house, and most of her suggestions were good.  He often wished she would ask for something unreasonable and extravagant.  But she had no selfish whims, and even insisted that the comfortable upstairs sleeping room he had planned with such care should be reserved for a guest chamber.

As the house began to take shape, Enid came up often in her car, to watch its growth, to show Claude samples of wallpapers and draperies, or a design for a window-seat she had cut from some magazine.  There could be no question of her pride in every detail.  The disappointing thing was that she seemed more interested in the house than in him.  These months when they could be together as much as they pleased, she treated merely as a period of time in which they were building a house.

Everything would be all right when they were married, Claude told himself.  He believed in the transforming power of marriage, as his mother believed in the miraculous effects of conversion.  Marriage reduced all women to a common denominator; changed a cool, self-satisfied girl into a loving and generous one.  It was quite right that Enid should be unconscious now of everything that she was to be when she was his wife.  He told himself he wouldn’t want it otherwise.