Selina had the difficult task of winning Roelf to her all over again. He was like a trusting little animal, who, wounded by the hand he has trusted, is shy of it. She used blandishments on this boy of thirteen such as she had never vouchsafed the man she was going to marry. He had asked her, bluntly, one day: “Why are you going to marry with him?” He never spoke the name.
She thought deeply. What to say? The answer ready on her tongue would have little meaning for this boy. There came to her a line from Lancelot and Elaine. She answered, “To serve him, and to follow him through the world.” She thought that rather fine-sounding until Roelf promptly rejected it. “That’s no reason. An answer out of a book. Anyway, to follow him through the world is dumb. He stays right here in High Prairie all his life.”
“How do you know!” Selina retorted, almost angrily. Startled, too.
“I know. He stays.”
Still, he could not withstand her long. Together they dug and planted flower beds in Pervus’s dingy front yard. It was too late for tulips now. Pervus had brought her some seeds from town. They ranged all the way from poppies to asters; from purple iris to morning glories. The last named were to form the back-porch vine, of course, because they grew quickly. Selina, city-bred, was ignorant of varieties, but insisted she wanted an old-fashioned garden—marigolds, pinks, mignonette, phlox. She and Roelf dug, spaded,
