Dominion Read Online Free Page B

her.
    â€œIt will be a grand carnival.”
    â€œI think I would enjoy that,” he answered, and took his leave, much better pleased than the Sunday before.
    As he made his way home on the western road he watched the sun beginning to set over the countryside and its final plunge of red intensity over his own land. I am building a utopia in the wilderness, he said to himself, quite satisfied, as he egged Ruth Potter up the hill to his front door. And his spirits were so lifted that it did not seem so much like a joke to him as a thing he might actually achieve.
    His first year he had approached the farm with all the enthusiasm of a new transaction, but he went to work on the fields that spring with a new confidence and even greater energies than the one before. As thefirst shoots of his crops poked forth from the black soil, his diligence toward them was unflagging. He was not grumpy when he rose in the morning to go out, but eager, and he worked through the day sustained by this same feeling. He found himself hopeful in ways he had not dared express before, even in the final days of his servitude. He thought often of the woman he would meet again at the new holiday and imagined her within his rooms. It was greatly relaxing to his mind, and he would fall asleep with romantic notions he had not entertained since his separation from Ruth.
    When Whitsunday came, he dressed in his clean shirt again and saddled the mule, then climbed astride, carefully guarding a bouquet of wildflowers in one hand. Outside of the settlement, the mule slowed down in front of the house where it had paused before, but he was able to keep control of it this time and persuade it to continue on. The animal obeyed and carried him on into town, where they stopped outside the inn and rested.
    Merian dusted his shirt, rearranged the flowers in his hand, and went inside. The first person he saw when he opened the door was Dorthea, and he found his courage leave him, not knowing what was proper behavior under the circumstances.
    â€œMerian, what pretty flowers,” she commented when she saw them.
    â€œI am glad you like them. I thought they might look nice on the table,” he answered, thrusting them at her.
    â€œSanne, look at the lovely flowers Merian brought from his place,” Dorthea said, drawing out her cousin.
    The other woman came over slowly, cautious both of him and of seeming too bold. “They look wonderful,” she offered stiffly. “What are they?”
    â€œWhy, they are utopia flowers,” Merian answered. “You must see the place I picked them someday.”
    Dorthea looked at her cousin with a sidelong glance from a corner of her eye, but Sanne cast her look away in shyness at Merian’s offer—although she did not fail to smile.
    â€œIf you keep asking, perhaps I will,” Sanne replied at last, before hurrying away across the room on an invented errand.
    Throughout the afternoon the two of them went on to trade nervous and youthful looks when they thought no one else might notice them. During songs they gazed at each other more brazenly, staring directly across the room as they sang. It was a joy for him to hear songssung he had not heard since his childhood, as well as those altogether strange to him, which Sanne said she learned as a young girl.
    At the end of the evening he bid her good-bye and asked again when they might next meet.
    â€œI am staying here for a few weeks,” she answered. “You can stop by when it pleases you.”
    Merian promised to visit, and even though he thought they had gotten on well, he was careful not to presume that the invitation meant anything more than that.
    That evening, after their guests had departed, Dorthea and her husband questioned their houseguest good-naturedly but reminded her all the same how little they still knew about Merian and advised her to proceed with what care she thought due.
    â€œHow much do we ever truly know about anyone,