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can marry.”
    “I guess you won’t,” Lucy told him, and Gus’s face turned red.
    Father and daughter stared at each other, neither turning away until Doll said, “Mama has a fine dinner all ready, and you can bring Mr. Turpin so’s we can all get acquainted.”
    “I expect we could do that,” Gus said, finally turning his head to look at Dolly.
    Then while Ted made arrangements to store his trunk at the depot, Dolly whispered to Lucy, “You let me talk to Papa. He’ll come around.”
    “I never promised I wouldn’t get married,” Lucy said stubbornly.
    “I’ll tell him that.”
    As they walked back to the shabby house, Ted and Lucy lagging a little behind, Lucy whispered, “Dolly will talk to Papa. She has a way with him. She’s the sweetest of us.”
    “Is she?” Ted replied. “Well, you’re the prettiest.”
     
    Lucy stayed in Swandyke for only a few days, since she had to return to her job at the drugstore. By the time she left, however, Gus had accepted Ted. Dolly and Margaret had convinced him that Lucy would keep her word about supporting the family. Ted would live in a boardinghouse operated by the dredge company while he looked for a little house. Lucy saw him whenever he was sent to Denver on some errand. He’d go into the drugstore and surprise her, or she’d return home from school or work and find him sitting in the front room with her aunt, who would excuse herself, saying she had forgotten about some urgent business that required her attention.
    They wrote to each other, of course, and Lucy revealed herself in letters as she had not done in conversation, quoting bits of poetry and writing her innermost thoughts. Once, she wrote that she would like the bedroom of their house painted blue “for the sky and your eyes,” and he wrote back that he had already found a house and would paint every room in it blue.
    She had been shy about discussing children with him but felt no such hesitation in her letters, saying she hoped they had two, a boy and a girl. “I want to name them Jack and Helen—Jack because I like it, and Helen for my sister. That’s Dolly’s real name,” she wrote.
    Ted responded, “Jack’s a favorite of mine, too. And your sister’s a crackerjack.”
    The time passed quickly, and now Lucy did not mind that her school years were coming to an end, because she had a future ahead of her. When a neighbor of her aunt’s moved away, Lucy bought the woman’s pots and pans and a set of dishes, all for two dollars, and shipped them to Ted for the house. Aunt Alice helped her hem sheets and tablecloths, and when Ted gave the measurements of the windows, the two women made curtains. Ted reported that he had hung them and they looked splendid.
    At first, the two engaged people wrote each other every week, but after a while, Ted’s letters came less often, because he spent long hours learning about gold dredging, Lucy knew. Besides, what was there to write about in Swandyke? Dolly and Margaret filled her in on what was happening with the family. The months passed. Lucy had hoped to go home at Christmas, but two employees quit at the drugstore, and the owner had been so kind to her that Lucy stayed on during the holidays.
    Late in January, on a day when the cold and wind in Denver were as bad as in Swandyke, Lucy got home late. The streetcar had been caught in a snowdrift, and she had had to walk a mile. As she turned in at the walk, she saw fresh footprints, a man’s. Whoever it was had just arrived, and Lucy thought it must be Ted. She went inside, and as she slipped off her coat in the hall, she heard her aunt ask, “So that’s for what intent you have come here.”
    “Hell done broke loose.” The voice was not Ted’s but her father’s, Lucy realized. He had not been to Denver since the day more than three years earlier when he had brought her down from Swandyke to start college.
    “Papa!” Lucy said, dropping her coat on the floor on her way into the front room.