Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/126

116 he missed her so; and he spent whole days driving vaguely round and round in the roads where he had driven with her; he knew well enough what all this misery meant, but while it was at its first height, he could not even grasp at any ray of comfort or hope. He loved this woman with the whole intensity of his reticent and long-restrained nature, though his common sense told him (when he let it lift up its voice at all) that it would be folly for him to think of her as his wife,—folly on all accounts: her utter unfitness for a farmer's wife; the utter improbability of her loving him. "Pshaw," he said to himself, a hundred times a day. "John Bassett, you are a fool!" Nevertheless, day by day, and night by night, a cruel hope whispered to him. He recalled every word Fanny had said of her glad delight in the Deerway life.

"I 'm sure," he thought, "no human being could be happier than she was here. She belongs to the country. She 's country all over. There is n't any of the city lady about her. Not a bit.

"She said she wished she could stay here all winter. She need n't ever lift her hand to do a stroke of work. I could keep two or three girls for her, just as well as not;" and good John Bassett thought over, with true manly pride, how he could give to his lady-love all which, in his simplicity of heart, he could conceive of even a city lady's requiring.

"I 'd build her any sort of a house she wanted,