“I would do anything in the world for you, Laura,” he exclaimed, encouraged by her words; “anything. You know I would. It isn’t so much that I want you to care for me⁠—and I guess I want that bad enough⁠—but it’s because I love to be with you, and be helping you, and all that sort of thing. Now, all this,” he waved a hand at the confusion of furniture, “all this today⁠—I just feel,” he declared with tremendous earnestness, “I just feel as though I were entering into your life. And just sitting here beside you and putting in these curtain hooks, I want you to know that it’s inspiring to me. Yes, it is, inspiring; it’s elevating. You don’t know how it makes a man feel to have the companionship of a good and lovely woman.”

“Landry, as though I were all that. Here, put another hook in here.”

She held the fold towards him. But he took her hand as their fingers touched and raised it to his lips and kissed it. She did not withdraw it, nor rebuke him, crying out instead, as though occupied with quite another matter: