He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.
A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in his future and Lydia's. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected her from all the asperities of reality; a good father--he had almost an actual vision of the children who would carry on his work in life--girls of Lydia's beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and uprightness--and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from now--in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess, a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his arm out.
"It's all up to me," he said aloud. "I can do it if I go after it hard enough. I've got to make good for Lydia's sake and mine. She must have the best I can get--the very best I know how to get for her."
A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. "Good Heavens, how I love her!" he thought as he ran down to meet her.