Page:Frank Owen - Woman Without Love (1949 reprint).djvu/44

 He who had always been saving with his money, spent to excess. He bought her a fine leather pocketbook, three of the latest novels and a large box of candy.

For no reason at all, Mary thought of Hattie Holt.

"It must be carnival time," she said wistfully.

Templeton Blaine, back in New York, never knew that his sister went home with Yekial Meigs.

Yekial Meigs, about ten miles out from Fort Wayne, Indiana, was a squat, rambling house that somehow gave one the impression it was kneeling.

When Mary Blaine saw it for the first time, she thought: "It has dug its way deep down into the soil. Perhaps someday it will disappear completely and go on and on burrowing like a mole in the vast black caverns of the earth."

She remembered an odd Chinese story she had read about an inverted house. Instead of being built upward, it was built downward several stories into the ground. So closely associated was it with the soil, in time it had taken root like a great tree and its tortuous halls spread out in all directions like tendrils. Mary wondered if this house, too, had taken root. She hoped so. It was good to live in a house that was alive. She hated the damp musty smell of dead rooms. The death-vault quietude. She wanted a house that smiled, that sang, a house whose halls echoed with laughter.

As the carriage came to a stop before the door, Yekial held out his hand in a sweeping gesture.

"This is my house," he said proudly, "and I own those broad fields almost as far off as the eye can see. Of course you can't measure distance here with any degree of exactitude because the country is too level, like a vast plate. However I imagine you'll never be hungry. If you like corn you can eat it by the ton. As