Barnabas stood before the house a few minutes, staring at it.  Then he walked around it slowly, his face upturned.  Then he went in the front door, swinging himself up over the sill, for there were no steps, and brushing the sawdust carefully from his clothes when he was inside.  He went all over the house, climbing a ladder to the second story, and viewing with pride the two chambers under the slant of the new roof.  He had repelled with scorn his father’s suggestion that he have a one-story instead of a story-and-a-half house.  Caleb had an inordinate horror and fear of wind, and his father, who had built the house in which he lived, had it before him.  Deborah often descanted indignantly upon the folly of sleeping in little tucked-up bedrooms instead of good chambers, because folks’ fathers had been scared to death of wind, and Barnabas agreed with her.  If he had inherited any of his father’s and grandfather’s terror of wind, he made no manifestation of it.

In the lower story of the new cottage were two square front rooms like those in his father’s house, and behind them the great kitchen with a bedroom out of it, and a roof of its own.

Barnabas paused at last in the kitchen, and stood quite still, leaning against a window casement.  The windows were not in, and the spaces let in the cool air and low light.  Outside was a long reach of field sloping gently upward.  In the distance, at the top of the hill, sharply outlined against the sky, was a black angle of roof and a great chimney.  A thin column of smoke rose out of it, straight and dark.  That was where Charlotte Barnard lived.

Barnabas looked out and saw the smoke rising from the chimney of the Barnard house.  There was a little hollow in the field that was quite blue with violets, and he noted that absently.  A team passed on the road outside; it was as if he saw and heard everything from the innermost recesses of his own life, and everything seemed strange and far off.

He turned to go, but suddenly stood still in the middle of the kitchen, as if some one had stopped him.  He looked at the new fireless hearth, through the open door into the bedroom which he would occupy after he was married to Charlotte, and through others into the front rooms, which would be apartments of simple state, not so closely connected with every-day life.  The kitchen windows would be sunny.  Charlotte would think it a pleasant room.

“Her rocking-chair can set there,” said Barnabas aloud.  The tears came into his eyes; he stepped forward, laid his smooth boyish cheek against a partition wall of this new house, and kissed it.  It was a fervent demonstration, not towards Charlotte alone, nor the joy to come to him within those walls, but to all life and love and nature, although he did not comprehend it.  He half sobbed as he turned away; his thoughts seemed to dazzle his brain, and he could not feel his feet.  He passed through the north front room, which would be the little-used parlor, to the door, and suddenly started at a long black shadow on the floor.  It vanished as he went on, and might have been due to his excited fancy, which seemed substantial enough to cast shadows.