Something
within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the
thoughts she had been having.
On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit Hugh's
shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see there. The
thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly planted in
fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to the factory and
had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the two men went to look
at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the shop.
She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little
grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley
went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she
continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She
asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying to
make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half turned
away and looked out through a window into Turner's Pike. His eyes, she
decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was something gray
and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the
person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something
in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature,
the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran
straight away into the distance.
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