Enid laughed.  “Not only for preachers, Claude.  For Gladys, when she comes to visit us—­you see she likes it—­and for your mother when she comes to spend a week and rest.  I don’t think we ought to take the best room for ourselves.”

“Why not?” Claude argued hotly.  “I’m building the whole house for ourselves.  Come out on the porch roof, Gladys.  Isn’t this fine for hot nights?  I want to put a railing round and make this into a balcony, where we can have chairs and a hammock.”

Gladys sat down on the low window-sill.  “Enid, you’d be foolish to keep this for a guest room.  Nobody would ever enjoy it as much as you would.  You can see the whole country from here.”

Enid smiled, but showed no sign of relenting.  “Let’s wait and watch the sun go down.  Be careful, Claude.  It makes me nervous to see you lying there.”

He was stretched out on the edge of the roof, one leg hanging over, and his head pillowed on his arm.  The flat fields turned red, the distant windmills flashed white, and little rosy clouds appeared in the sky above them.

“If I make this into a balcony,” Claude murmured, “the peak of the roof will always throw a shadow over it in the afternoon, and at night the stars will be right overhead.  It will be a fine place to sleep in harvest time.”

“Oh, you could always come up here to sleep on a hot night,” Enid said quickly.

“It wouldn’t be the same.”

They sat watching the light die out of the sky, and Enid and Gladys drew close together as the coolness of the autumn evening came on.  The three friends were thinking about the same thing; and yet, if by some sorcery each had begun to speak his thoughts aloud, amazement and bitterness would have fallen upon all.  Enid’s reflections were the most blameless.  The discussion about the guest room had reminded her of Brother Weldon.  In September, on her way to Michigan with Mrs. Royce, she had stopped for a day in Lincoln to take counsel with Arthur Weldon as to whether she ought to marry one whom she described to him as “an unsaved man.”  Young Mr. Weldon approached this subject with a cautious tread, but when he learned that the man in question was Claude Wheeler, he became more partisan than was his wont.  He seemed to think that her marrying Claude was the one way to reclaim him, and did not hesitate to say that the most important service devout girls could perform for the church was to bring promising young men to its support.  Enid had been almost certain that Mr. Weldon would approve her course before she consulted him, but his concurrence always gratified her pride.  She told him that when she had a home of her own she would expect him to spend a part of his summer vacation there, and he blushingly expressed his willingness to do so.

Gladys, too, was lost in her own thoughts, sitting with that ease which made her seem rather indolent, her head resting against the empty window frame, facing the setting sun.  The rosy light made her brown eyes gleam like old copper, and there was a moody look in them, as if in her mind she were defying something.  When he happened to glance at her, it occurred to Claude that it was a hard destiny to be the exceptional person in a community, to be more gifted or more intelligent than the rest.  For a girl it must be doubly hard.  He sat up suddenly and broke the long silence.