 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Robin Cotter. April 2007. Summer by Edith Wharton. Chapter 7 Since her reinstatement in Miss Hatchard's favour, charity had not dared to curtail by a moment her hours of attendance at the library. She even made a point of arriving before the time, and showed a laudable indignation when the youngest target girl, who had been engaged to help in the cleaning and rearranging of the books, came trailing in late and neglected her task to peer through the window at the solace-boy. Nevertheless, library days seemed more than ever irksome to charity after her vivid hours of liberty, and she would have found it hard to set a good example to her support in it, if Lucius Harney had not been commissioned, before Miss Hatchard's departure, to examine with the local carpenter the best means of ventilating the memorial. He was careful to prosecute this inquiry on the days when the library was open to the public, and charity was therefore sure spending part of the afternoon in his company. The target girl's presence, and the risk of being interrupted by some passer by suddenly smitten with a thirst for letters, restricted their intercourse to the exchange of common places, but there was a fascination to charity in the contrast between these public civilities and their secret intimacy. The day after their drive to the brown house was, library day, and she sat at her desk, working at the revised catalogue, while the target girl, one eye on the window, chanted out the titles of a pile of books. Lucius's thoughts were far away in the dismal house by the swamp, and under the twilight sky during the long drive home when Lucius Harney had consoled her with endearing words. That day, for the first time since he had been boarding with them, he had failed to appear as usual at the midday meal. No message had come to explain his absence, and Mr. Royal, who was more than usually taciturn, had betrayed no surprise, and made no comment. In itself this indifference was not particularly significant, for Mr. Royal, in common with most of his fellow citizens, had a way of accepting events passively, as if he had long since come to the conclusion that no one who lived in North Dormer could hope to modify them. But to charity, in the reaction from her mood of passionate exultation, there was something disquieting in his silence. It was almost as if Lucius Harney had never had a part in their lives. Mr. Royal's imperturbable indifference seemed to relegate him to the domain of unreality. As she sat at work, she tried to shake off her disappointment at Harney's non-appearing. Some trifling incident had probably kept him from joining them at midday, but she was sure he must be eager to see her again, and that he would not want to wait till they met at supper between Mr. Royal and Verena. She was wondering what his first words would be, and trying to devise a way of getting rid of the target girl before he came, when she heard steps outside, and he walked up the path with Mr. Miles. The clergyman from Hepburn seldom came to North Dormer except when he drove over to officiate at the old white church, which, by an unusual chance, happened to belong to the Episcopal Communion. He was a brisk affable man, eager to make the most of the fact that a little nucleus of church people had survived in the sectarian wilderness, and resolved to undermine the influence of the gingerbread-colored Baptist chapel at the other end of the village. But he was kept busy by parochial work at Hepburn, where there were paper mills and saloons, and it was not often that he could spare time for North Dormer. Charity who went to the white church, like all the best people in North Dormer, admired Mr. Miles, and had even, during the memorable trip to Nettleton, imagined herself married to a man who had such a straight nose and such a beautiful way of speaking, and who lived in a brown stone rectory, covered with Virginia creeper. It had been a shock to discover that the privilege was already enjoyed by a lady with crimped hair and a large baby. But the arrival of Lucius Harney had long since banished Mr. Miles from Charity's and as he walked up the path at Harney's side, she saw him as he really was, a fat, middle-aged man with a baldness showing under his clerical hat, and spectacles on his Grecian nose. She wondered what had called him to North Dormer on a weekday, and felt a little hurt that Harney should have brought him to the library. It presently appeared that his presence there was due to Miss Hatchard. He had been spending a few days at Springfield to fill a friend's pulpit, and had been consulted by Miss Hatchard as to young Harney's plan for ventilating the memorial. To lay hands on the Hatchard arc was a grave matter, and Miss Hatchard, always full of scruples about her scruples, it was Harney's phrase, wished to have Mr. Miles's opinion before deciding. I couldn't, Mr. Miles explained, quite make-out from your cousin what changes you wanted to make, and as the other trustees did not understand either, I thought I had better drive over and take a look, though I'm sure, he added, turning his friendly spectacles on the young man, that no one could be more competent, but of course this spot has its peculiar sanctity. I hope a little fresh air won't desecrate it, Harney laughingly rejoined, and they walked to the other end of the library while he set forth his idea to the rector. Mr. Miles had greeted the two girls with his usual friendliness, but Charity saw that he was occupied with other things, and she presently became aware, by the scraps of conversation drifting over to her, that he was still under the charm of his visit to Springfield, which appeared to have been full of agreeable incidents. Ah! the Coopersons! Yes, you know them, of course, she heard, that's a fine old house, and Ned Cooperson has collected some really remarkable impressionist pictures. The names he cited were unknown to Charity. Yes, yes, the Schaefer Quartet played at Lyric Hall on Saturday evening, and on Monday I had the privilege of hearing them again at the Towers, beautifully done, Bach and Beethoven, a lawn party first. I saw Miss Balch several times, by the way, looking extremely handsome. Charity dropped her pencil, and forgot to listen to the target girl's sing-song. Why had Mr. Miles suddenly brought up Annabelle Balch's name? Oh, really? She heard Harney rejoin, and raising his stick, he pursued. You see, my plan is to move these shelves away, and open a round window in this wall, on the axis of the one under the pediment. I suppose she'll be coming up here later to stay with Miss Hatchard? Mr. Miles went on, following on his train of thought, then spinning about and tilting his head back. Yes, yes, I see, I understand, that will give a draft without materially altering the look of things. I can see no objection. The discussion went on for some minutes, and gradually the two men moved back toward the desk. Mr. Miles stopped again, and looked thoughtfully at Charity. Aren't you a little pale, my dear? Not overworking. Mr. Harney tells me you and Mamie are giving the library a thorough overhauling. He was always careful to remember his parishioner's Christian names, and at the right moment he bent his benign inspectacles on the target girl. Then he turned to Charity. Don't take things hard, my dear. Don't take things hard. Come down and see Mrs. Miles and me some day at Hepburn," he said, pressing her hand and waving a farewell to Mamie's target. He went out of the library, and Harney followed him. Charity thought she detected a look of constraint in Harney's eyes. She fancied he did not want to be alone with her, and with a sudden pang she wondered if he repented the tender things he had said to her the night before. His words had been more fraternal than loverlike, but she had lost their exact sense in the caressing warmth of his voice. He had made her feel that the fact of her being away from the mountain was only another reason for holding her close and soothing her with consolatory murmurs. And when the drive was over, and she got out of the buggy, tired, cold, and aching with emotion, she stepped as if the ground were a sunlit wave and she the spray on its crest. Why then had his manner suddenly changed, and why did he leave the library with Mr. Miles? Her restless imagination fastened on the name of Annabel Balch. From the moment it had been mentioned she fancied that Harney's expression had altered. Annabel Balch at a garden party at Springfield, looking extremely handsome. Perhaps Mr. Miles had seen her there at the very moment when Charity and Harney were sitting in the Hyatt's hovel between a drunkard and a half-witted old woman. Charity did not know exactly what a garden party was, but her glimpse of the flower-edged lawns of Neddleton helped her to visualise the scene and envious recollections of which Miss Balch avowedly wore out, when she came to North Dormer, made it only too easy to picture her in her splendour. Charity understood what associations the name must have called up, and felt the uselessness of struggling against the unseen influences in Harney's life. When she came down from her room for supper he was not there, and while she waited in the porch she recalled the tone in which Mr. Royle had commented the day before on their early start. Mr. Royle sat at her side, his chair tilted back, his broad black boots with side elastics resting against the lower bar of the railings. His rumpled gray hair stood up above his forehead, like the crest of an angry bird, and the leather brown of his vain cheeks was blotched with red. He knew that those red spots were the signs of a coming explosion. Suddenly he said, Where's supper? Has Verena Marsh slipped up again on her soda-biscuits? Charity threw a startled glance at him. I presume she's waiting for Mr. Harney. Mr. Harney, is she? She'd better dish up, then. He ain't coming. He stood up, walked to the door, and called out, in the pitch necessary to penetrate the old woman's timpanum. Get along with the supper, Verena. Charity was trembling with apprehension. Something had happened. She was sure of it now, and Mr. Royle knew what it was. But not for the world which she have gratified him by showing her anxiety. She took her usual place, and he seated himself opposite, and poured out a strong cup of tea before passing her the teapot. Verena brought some scrambled eggs, and he piled his plate with them. Aren't you going to take any? He asked. Charity roused herself and began to eat. The tone with which Mr. Royle had said, he's not coming, seemed to her full of an ominous satisfaction. She saw that he had suddenly begun to hate Lucius Harney, and guessed herself to be the cause of this change of feeling. But she had no means of finding out whether some act of hostility on his part had made the young man stay away, or whether he simply wished to avoid seeing her again after their drive back from the brown house. She ate her supper with a studied show of indifference, but she knew that Mr. Royle was watching her, and that her agitation did not escape him. After supper she went up to her room. She heard Mr. Royle cross the passage, and presently the sounds below her window showed that he had returned to the porch. She seated herself on her bed, and began to struggle against the desire to go down, and ask him what had happened. I'd rather die than do it, she muttered to herself. For the word he could have relieved her uncertainty, but never would she gratify him by saying it. She rose and leaned out of the window. The twilight had deepened in to-night, and she watched the frail curve of the young moon dropping to the edge of the hills. Through the darkness she saw one or two figures moving down the road, but the evening was too cold for loitering, and presently the strollers disappeared. Lamps were beginning to show here and there in the windows. A bar of light brought out the whiteness of a clump of lilies in the haw's yard. And farther down the street Karak Fry's Rochester lamp cast its bold illumination on the rustic flower-tub in the middle of his grass plot. For a long time she continued to lean in the window, but a fever of unrest consumed her, and finally she went downstairs, took her hat from its hook, and swung out of the house. After Royal sat on the porch, Berina beside him, her old hands crossed on her patched skirt. As charity went down the steps Mr. Royal called after her, Where are you going? She could easily have answered to Ormas, or down to the targets, and either answer might have been true, for she had no purpose, but she swept on in silence, determined not to recognize his right to question her. At the gate she paused, and looked up and down the road. The darkness drew her, and she thought of climbing the hill, and plunging into the depths of the large wood above the pasture. Then she glanced irresolutely along the street, and as she did so a gleam appeared through the spruces at Miss Hatcher's gate. Lucius Harney was there then. He had not gone down to Hepburn with Mr. Miles as she had at first imagined. But where had he taken his evening meal, and what had caused him to stay away from Mr. Royal's? The light was positive proof of his presence, for Miss Hatcher's servants were away on a holiday, and her farmer's wife came only in the mornings to make the young man's bed, and to prepare his coffee. Beside that lamp he was doubtless sitting at this moment. To know the truth Charity had only to walk half the length of the village, and knock at the lighted window. She hesitated a minute or two longer, and then turned toward Miss Hatcher's. She walked quickly, straining her eyes to detect anyone who might be coming along the street, and before reaching the fries she crossed over to avoid the light from their window. Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her. But the street was empty, and she passed unnoticed through the gate, and up the path to the house. Its white front glimmered indistinctly through the trees, showing only one oblong of light on the lower floor. She had supposed that the lamp was in Miss Hatcher's sitting-room, but she saw now that it shone through a window at the farther corner of the house. She did not know the room to which this window belonged, and she paused under the trees, checked by a sense of strangeness. Then she moved on, treading softly in the short grass, and keeping so close to the house that whoever was in the room, even if roused by her approach, would not be able to see her. The window opened on a narrow veranda with a trellist arch. She leaned close to the trellis, and parting the sprays of climatis that covered it, looked into a corner of the room. She saw the foot of a mahogany bed, an engraving on the wall, a washstand on which a towel had been tossed, and one end of the green-covered table which held the lamp. Half of the lampshade projected into her field of vision, and just under it two smooth sun-burned hands, one holding a pencil, and the other a ruler, were moving to and fro over a drawing-board. Her heart jumped, and then stood still. He was there a few feet away, and while her soul was tossing on seas of woe, he had been quietly sitting at his drawing-board. The sight of those two hands, moving with their usual skill and precision, woke her out of her dream. Her eyes were open to the disproportion between what she had felt and the cause of her agitation, and she was turning away from the window, when one hand abruptly pushed aside the drawing-board, and the other flung down the pencil. Charity had often noticed Harney's loving care of his drawings, and the neatness and method with which he carried on and concluded each task. The impatient sweeping aside of the drawing-board seemed to reveal a new mood. The gesture suggested sudden discouragement, or distaste for his work, and she wondered if he too were agitated by secret perplexities. Her impulse of flight was checked. She stepped up on the veranda, and looked into the room. Harney had put his elbows on the table, and was resting his chin on his locked hands. He had taken off his coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt. She saw the vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the chest. He sat staring straight ahead of him, a look of weariness and self-disgust on his face. It was almost as if he had been gazing at a distorted reflection of his own features. For a moment Charity looked at him with a kind of terror, as if he had been a stranger under familiar lineaments. Then she glanced past him, and saw on the floor an open, portmanteau, half full of clothes. She understood that he was preparing to leave, and that he had probably decided to go without seeing her. She saw that the decision, from whatever cause it was taken, had disturbed him deeply, and she immediately concluded that his change of plan was due to some surreptitious interference of Mr. Royles. All her old resentments and rebellions flamed up, confusedly mingled with the yearning roused by Harney's nearness. Only a few hours earlier she had felt secure in his comprehending pity. Now she was flung back on herself, doubly alone after that moment of communion. Harney was still unaware of her presence. He sat without moving, moodily staring before him at the same spot in the wallpaper. He had not even had the energy to finish his packing, and his clothes and papers lay on the floor about the portmanteau. Presently he unlocked his clasped hands and stood up, and Charity, drawing back hastily, sank down on the step of the veranda. The night was so dark that there was not much chance of his seeing her, unless he opened the window, and before that she would have time to slip away and be lost in the shadow of the trees. He stood for a minute or two, looking around the room with the same expression of self-discussed as if he hated himself and everything about him. Then he sat down again at the table, drew a few more strokes, and threw his pencil aside. Finally he walked across the floor, kicking the portmanteau out of his way, and lay down on the bed, folding his arms under his head, and staring up morosely at the ceiling. But so Charity had seen him at her side on the grass or the pine needles, his eyes fixed on the sky, and pleasure flashing over his face, like the flickers of sun the branches shed on it. But now the face was so changed that she hardly knew it, and grief at his grief gathered in her throat, rose to her eyes, and ran over. She continued to crouch on the steps, holding her breath and stiffening herself into complete immobility. One motion of her hand, one tap on the pain, and she could picture the sudden change in his face. In every pulse of her rigid body she was aware of the welcome his eyes and lips would give her. But something kept her from moving. It was not the fear of any sanction, human or heavenly. She had never in her life been afraid. It was simply that she had suddenly understood what would happen if she went in. It was the thing that did happen between young men and girls, and that North Dormer ignored in public and snickered over on the sly. It was what Miss Hatchard was still ignorant of, but every girl of Charity's class knew about before she left school. It was what had happened to Allie Hawes' sister, Julia, and had ended up in her going to Nettleton, and in people's never mentioning her name. It did not, of course, always end so sensationally, nor perhaps on the whole, so untragically. Harnie had always suspected that the shun Julia's fate might have its compensations. There were others worse endings that the village knew of, mean, miserable, unconfessed. Other lives that went on drearily, without visible change, in the same cramped setting of hypocrisy. But these were not the reasons that held her back. Since the day before she had known exactly what she would feel if Harnie should take her in his arms, the melting of palm into palm, and mouth on mouth, and the long flame burning her from head to foot. But mixed with this feeling was another. The wondering pride in his liking for her, the startled softness that his sympathy had put into her heart. Sometimes when her youth flushed up in her she had imagined yielding, like other girls, to furtive caresses in the twilight. But she could not so cheapen herself to Harnie. She did not know why he was going, but since he was going she felt she must do nothing to deface the image of her that he carried away. If he wanted her he must seek her. He must not be surprised into taking her, as girls like Julia Hawes were taken. No sound came from the sleeping village, and in the deep darkness of the garden she heard now and then a secret rustle of branches as though some night-bird brushed them. Once a footfall passed the gate, and she shrank back into her corner, but the steps died away and left a profounder quiet. Her eyes were still on Harnie's tormented face. She felt she could not move till he moved, but she was beginning to grow numb from her constrained position, and at times her thoughts were so indistinct that she seemed to be held there only by a vague weight of weariness. A long time passed in this strange vigil, Harnie still lay on the bed motionless and with fixed eyes, as though following his vision to its bitter end. At last he stirred and changed his attitude slightly, and Charity's heart began to tremble, but he only flung out his arms and sank back into his former position. With a deep sigh he tossed the hair from his forehead, then his whole body relaxed, his head turned sideways on the pillow, and she saw that he had fallen asleep. The sweet expression came back to his lips, and the haggardness faded from his face, leaving it as fresh as a boy's. She rose and crept away. She had lost the sense of time, and did not know how late it was till she came out into the street, and saw that all the windows were dark between Miss Hatchards and the Royal House. As she passed from under the black pall of the Norway Spruces, she fancied she saw two figures in the shade about the duck pond. She drew back and watched, but nothing moved, and she had stared so long into the lamp-lit room that the darkness confused her, and she thought she must have been mistaken. She walked on, wondering whether Mr. Royal was still in the porch. In her exalted mood she did not greatly care whether he was waiting for her or not. She seemed to be floating high over life, on a great cloud of misery beneath which every day realities had dwindled to mere specks in space. But the porch was empty. Mr. Royal's hat hung on its peg in the passage, and the kitchen lamp had been left to light her to bed. She took it, and went up. The morning hours of the next day dragged by without incident. Charity had imagined that, in some way or other, she would learn whether Harney had already left, but Verena's deafness prevented her being a source of news, and no one came to the house who could bring enlightenment. Mr. Royal went out early, and did not return till Verena had set the table for the midday meal. When he came in he went straight to the kitchen, and shouted to the old woman, ready for dinner! Then he turned into the dining-room, where Charity was already seated. Harney's plate was in its usual place, but Mr. Royal offered no explanation of his absence, and Charity asked none. The feverish exultation of the night before had dropped, and she said to herself that he had gone away, indifferently, almost callously, and that now her life would lapse again into the narrow rut out of which he had lifted it. For a moment she was inclined to sneer at herself for not having used the arts that might have kept him. She sat at table till the meal was over, lest Mr. Royal should remark on her leaving, but when he stood up she rose also, without waiting to help Verena. She had her foot on the stairs when he called her to come back. I've got a headache. I'm going to lie down. I want you should come in here first. I've got something to say to you." She was sure from his tone that at a moment she would learn what every nerve in her ached to know. But as she turned back she made a last effort of indifference. Mr. Royal stood in the middle of the office, his thick eyebrows beatling, his lower jaw trembling a little. At first she thought he had been drinking, then she saw that he was sober, but stirred by a deep and stern emotion, totally unlike his usual transient angers. And suddenly she understood that, until then, she had never really noticed him or thought about him. Except on the occasion of his one offence he had been to her merely the person who is always there, the unquestioned central fact of life, as inevitable but as uninteresting as North Dormer itself, or any of the other conditions fate had laid on her. Even then she had regarded him only in relation to herself, and had never speculated as to his own feelings, beyond instinctively concluding that he would not trouble her again in the same way. But now she began to wonder what he was really like. He had grasped the back of his chair with both hands and stood looking hard at her. At length he said, Charity, for once lets you and me talk together like friends. Suddenly she felt that something had happened, and that he held her in his hand. Where is Mr. Harney? Why hasn't he come back? Have you sent him away?" she broke out, without knowing what she was saying. The change in Mr. Royal frightened her. All the blood seemed to leave his veins, and against his swarthy pallor, the deep lines in his face looked black. Didn't he have time to answer some of those questions last night? You was with him long enough, he said. Charity stood speechless. The taunt was so unrelated to what had been happening in her soul that she hardly understood it. But the instinct of self-defense awoke in her. Who says I was with him last night? The whole place is saying it by now. Then it was you that put that lie into their mouths. Oh, how I've always hated you!" she cried. She had expected a retort in kind, and it startled her to hear her exclamation, sounding on through silence. Yes, I know. Mr. Royal said slowly, but that ain't going to help us much now. It helps me not to care straw what lies you tell about me. If they're lies, they're not my lies, my Bible oath on that, Charity. I didn't know where you were. I wasn't out of this house last night. She made no answer, and he went on. Is it a lie that you were seeing coming out of Miss Hatchard's nigh onto midnight? She straightened herself with a laugh. All her reckless insolence recovered. I didn't look to see what time it was. You lost girl, you—you—oh, my God, why did you tell me? He broke out, dropping into his chair, his head bowed like an old man's. Charity's self-possession had returned with a sense of her danger. Do you suppose I take the trouble to lie to you? Who are you anyhow, to ask me where I go to when I go out at night? Mr. Royal lifted his head and looked at her. His face had grown quiet and almost gentle, as she remembered seeing it sometimes when she was a little girl, before Mrs. Royal died. Don't let's go on like this, Charity. It can't do any good to either of us. You were seen going into that fellow's house. You were seen coming out of it. I've watched this thing coming, and I've tried to stop it. As God sees me, I have— Ah! It was you, then! I knew it was you that sent him away. He looked at her in surprise. Didn't he tell you so? I thought he understood. He spoke slowly, with difficult pauses. I didn't name you to him. I'd have cut my hand off sooner. I just told him I couldn't spare the horse any longer, and that the cooking was getting too heavy for Verena. I guess he's the kind that's heard the same thing before. Anyhow, he took it quietly enough. He said his job here was about done, anyhow, and there didn't another word pass between us. If he told you otherwise, he told you an untruth. Nobody listened in a cold trace of anger. It was nothing to her what the village said, but all this fingering of her dreams. I've told you he didn't tell me anything. I didn't speak with him last night. You didn't speak with him? No. It's not that I care what any of you say, but you may as well know. Things ain't between us the way you think, and the other people in this place. He was kind to me. He was my friend, and all of a sudden he stopped coming, and I knew it was you that done it. I knew. All her unreconciled memory of the past flamed out at him. So I went there last night to find out what you'd said to him. That's all. Mr. Royal drew a heavy breath. But then, if he wasn't there, what were you doing there all that time? Charity for pity's sake tell me, I've got to know to stop their talking. This pathetic abdication of all authority over her did not move her. She could only feel the outrage of his interference. Didn't you see that I don't care what anybody says? It's true I went there to see him, and he was in his room, and I stood outside for ever so long and watched him, but I durst not go in for fear he'd think I'd come after him. She felt her voice breaking, and gathered it up in a last defiance. As long as I live I'll never forgive you," she cried. Mr. Royal made no answer. He sat and pondered with sunken head. His veined hands clasped about the arms of his chair. Age seemed to have come down on him, as winter comes on the hills after a storm. At length he looked up. Charity, you say you don't care, but you're the proudest girl I know, and the last to want people to talk against you. You know there's always eyes watching you. You're handsomer and smarter than the rest. And that's enough. But till lately you've never given them a chance. Now they've got it, and they're going to use it. I believe what you say, but they won't. It was Mrs. Tom Fry seeing you going in, and two or three of them watched for you to come out again. You've been with the fellow all day long, every day, since he come here, and I'm a lawyer, and I know how hard Slander dies. He paused. But she stood motionless, without giving him any sign of acquiescence, or even of attention. He's a pleasant fellow to talk to. I liked having him here myself. The young man up here ain't had his chances. But there's one thing as old as the hills in his plainest daylight. If he'd wanted you the right way, he'd have said so. Charity did not speak. It seemed to her that nothing could exceed the bitterness of hearing such words from such lips. Mr. Royal rose from his seat. See here, Charity Royal. I had a shameful thought once, and you've made me pay for it. Isn't that score pretty near wiped out? There's a streak in me I ain't always master of, but I've always acted straight to you but that once, and you've known I would. You've trusted me. For all your sneers and your mockery, you've always known I loved you the way a man loves a decent woman. I'm a good many years older than you, but I'm head and shoulders above this place and everybody in it, and you know that too. I slipped up once, but there's no reason for not starting again. If you'll come with me, I'll do it. If you'll marry me, we'll leave here and settle in some big town where there's men and business and things doing. It's not too late for me to find an opening. I can see it by the way folks treat me when I go down to Hepburn or Neddleton. Charity made no movement. Nothing in his appeal reached her heart, and she thought only of words to wound and wither. But a growing lassitude restrained her. What did anything matter what he was saying? She saw the old life closing in on her, and hardly heeded his fanciful picture of renewal. Charity. Charity, say you'll do it! She heard him urge, all his lost years, and wasted passion in his voice. Oh, what's the use of all this? When I leave here it won't be with you. She moved toward the door as she spoke, and he stood up and placed himself between her and the threshold. He seemed suddenly tall and strong, as though the extremity of his humiliation had given him new vigor. That's all, is it? It's not much. He leaned against the door, so towering and powerful, that he seemed to fill the narrow room. Well then look here. You're right. I have no claim on you. Why should you look at a broken man like me? You want the other fellow, and I don't blame you. You picked out the best when you've seen it. Well, that was always my way. He fixed his stern eyes on her, and she had the sense that the struggle within him was at its highest. Do you want him to marry you? He asked. They stood and looked at each other for a long moment, eye to eye, with the terrible equality of courage that sometimes made her feel as if she had his blood in her veins. Do you want him to, say? I'll have him here in an hour, if you do. I ain't been in the law thirty years for nothing. He's hired Carrick Frye's team to take him to Hepburn, but he ain't going to start for another hour, and I can put things to him so he won't be long deciding. He's soft. I could see that. I don't say you won't be sorry afterward, but, by God, I'll give you the chance to be if you say so. She heard him out in silence, too remote from all he was feeling and saying, for any sally of scorn to relieve her. As she listened, there flitted through her mind the vision of Lyff Hyatt's muddy boot coming down on the white bramble flowers. The same thing had happened now, something transient and exquisite had flowered in her, and she had stood by and seen it trample to earth. While the thought passed through her, she was aware of Mr. Royal, still leaning against the door, but crestfallen, diminished, as though her silence were the answer he most dreaded. I don't want any chance you can give me. I'm glad he's going away, she said. He kept his place a moment longer, his hand on the door-knob. Charity! He pleaded. She made no answer, and he turned the knob and went out. She heard him fumble with the latch of the front door, and saw him walk down the steps. He passed out of the gate, and his figure, stooping and heavy, receded slowly up the street. For a while she remained where he had left her. She was still trembling with the humiliation of his last words, which rang so loud in her ears that it seemed as though they must echo through the village, proclaiming her a creature to lend herself to such vile suggestions. Her shame weighed on her like a physical oppression. The roof and walls seemed to be closing in on her, and she was seized by the impulse to get away. Under the open sky, where there would be room to breathe, she went to the front door, and as she did so, Lucius Harney opened it. He looked graver and less confident than usual, and for a moment or two neither of them spoke, then he held out his hand. Are you going out? He asked. May I come in? Her heart was beating so violently that she was afraid to speak, and stood looking at him with tear-dilated eyes, then she became aware of what her silence must betray, and said quickly, Yes, come in. She led the way into the dining-room, and they sat down on opposite sides of the table, the crew at stand and Japan bread-basket between them. Harney had laid his straw hat on the table, and as he sat there, in his easy-looking summer clothes, a brown tie knotted under his flannel collar, and his smooth brown hair brushed back from his forehead. She pictured him, as she had seen him the night before, lying on his bed, with the tossed locks falling into his eyes, and his bare throat rising out of his unbuttoned shirt. He had never seemed so remote as at the moment when that vision flashed through her mind. I'm so sorry it's good-bye. I suppose you know I'm leaving. He began, abruptly and awkwardly. She guessed that he was wondering how much she knew of his reasons for going. I presume you found your work was over quicker than what you expected, she said. Well, yes, that is—no, there are plenty of things I should have liked to do, but my holiday is limited, and now that Mr. Royal needs the horse for himself, it's rather difficult to find means of getting about. There ain't too many teams for hire around here, she acquiesced, and there was another silence. These days here have been awfully pleasant. I wanted to thank you for making them so, he continued, his color rising. She could not think of any reply, and he went on. You've been wonderfully kind to me, and I wanted to tell you, I wish I could think of you as happier, less lonely. Things are sure to change for you, by and by. Things don't change at North Dormer. People just get used to them. The answer seemed to break up the order of his prearranged consolations, and he sat looking at her uncertainly. Then he said, with his sweet smile—that's not true of you, it can't be. The smile was like a knife thrust through her heart. Nothing in her began to tremble, and break loose. She felt her tears run over, and stood up. Well, good-bye, she said. She was aware of his taking her hand, and of feeling that his touch was lifeless. Good-bye. He turned away, and stopped on the threshold. You'll say good-bye for me to Verena? She heard the closing of the outer door, and the sound of his quick tread along the path. The latch of the gate clicked after him. The next morning when she arose in the cold dawn, and opened her shutters, she saw a freckled boy standing on the other side of the road, and looking up at her. He was a boy from a farm three or four miles down the Creston Road, and she wondered what he was doing there at that hour, and why he looked so hard at her window. When he saw her he crossed over, and leaned against the gate unconcernedly. There was no one stirring in the house, and she threw a shawl over her nightgown, and ran down and let herself out. By the time she reached the gate the boy was sauntering down the road, whistling carelessly, but she saw that a letter had been thrust between the slats and the cross-bar of the gate. She took it out, and hastened back to her room. The envelope bore her name, and inside was a leaf torn from a pocket-diary. Dear Charity, I can't go away like this. I am staying for a few days at Creston River. Will you come down and meet me at Creston Pool? I will wait for you till evening. Charity sat before the mirror, trying on a hat, which alley haws, with much secrecy had trimmed for her. It was of white straw, with a drooping brim and cherry-coloured lining that made her face glow like the inside of the shell on the parlor mantelpiece. She propped the square of looking-glass against Mr. Royle's black leather-bible, steadying it in front with a white stone on which a view of the Brooklyn Bridge was painted, and she sat before her reflection, bending the brim this way and that, while alley haws's pale face looked over her shoulder like the ghost of wasted opportunities. I look awful, don't I? She said at last with a happy sigh. Allie smiled and took back the hat. I'll stitch the roses on right here, so you can put it away at once. Charity laughed and ran her fingers through her rough, dark hair. She knew that Harney liked to see its reddish edges, ruffled about her forehead, and breaking into little rings at the nape. She sat down on her bed, and watched Allie stoop over the hat, with a careful frown. Don't you ever feel like going to Nettleton for a day? She asked. Allie shook her head without looking up. No, I always remember that awful time I went down with Julia to that doctor's. Oh, Allie! I can't help it. The house is on the corner of Wing Street and Lake Avenue. The trolley from the station goes right by it, and the day the minister took us down to see those pictures, I recognized it right off and couldn't seem to see anything else. There's a big black sign with gold letters all across the front, private consultations. She came as near as anything to dying. Poor Julia! Charity sighed from the height of her purity and her security. She had a friend whom she trusted, and who respected her. She was going with him to spend the next day, the fourth of July, at Nettleton. Whose business was it but hers? And what was the harm? The pity of it was that girls like Julia did not know how to choose, and to keep bad fellows at a distance. Charity slipped down from the bed, and stretched out her hands. Is it so'd? Let me try it on again. She put the hat on, and smiled at her image, the thought of Julia had vanished. The next morning she was up before dawn, and saw the yellow sunrise broaden behind the hills, and the silvery luster preceding a hot day tremble across the sleeping fields. Her plans had been made with great care. She had announced that she was going down to the band of Hope Picnic at Hepburn, and as no one else from North Dormer intended to venture so far, it was not likely that her absence from the festivity would be reported. Besides, if it were, she would not greatly care. She was determined to assert her independence, and if she stooped to fib about the Hepburn Picnic, it was chiefly from the secretive instinct that made her dread the profanation of her happiness. Whenever she was with Lucius Harney, she would have liked some impenetrable mountain mist to hide her. It was arranged that she should walk to a point of the Creston Road where Harney was to pick her up, and drive her across the hills to Hepburn in time for the nine-thirty train to Nettleton. Harney at first had been rather lukewarm about the trip. He declared himself ready to take her to Nettleton, but urged her not to go on the Fourth of July, on account of the crowds, the probable lateness of the trains, the difficulty of her getting back before night, but her evident disappointment caused him to give way and even to effect a faint enthusiasm for the adventure. She understood why he was not more eager. He must have seen sights beside which even a Fourth of July at Nettleton would seem tame. But she had never seen anything, and a great longing possessed her to walk the streets of a big town on a holiday. She came to his arm, and jostled by idle crowds in their best clothes. The only cloud on the prospect was the fact that the shops would be closed, but she hoped he would take her back another day, when they were open. She started out unnoticed in the early sunlight, slipping through the kitchen while Verena bent above the stove. To avoid attracting notice, she carried her new hat carefully wrapped up, and had thrown a long gray veil of Mrs. Royals over the new white muslin dress which Allie's clever fingers had made for her. All of the ten dollars Mr. Royal had given her, and a part of her own savings as well, had been spent on renewing her wardrobe, and when Harney jumped out of the buggy to meet her, she read her reward in his eyes. The freckled boy who had brought her the note two weeks earlier was to wait with the buggy at Hepburn till their return. He purged at Charity's feet, his legs dangling between the wheels, and they could not say much because of his presence. But it did not greatly matter, for their past was now rich enough to have given them a private language, and with the long day stretching before them like the blue distance beyond the hills, there was a delicate pleasure in postponement. When Charity, in response to Harney's message, had gone to meet him at the Creston Pool, her heart had been so full of mortification and anger that his first words might easily have estranged her. But it happened that he had found the right word, which was one of simple friendship. His tone had instantly justified her, and put her guardian in the wrong. He had made no allusion to what had passed between Mr. Royal and himself, but it simply let it appear that he had left because means of conveyance were hard to find at North Dormer, and because Creston River was a more convenient centre. He told her that he had hired by the week the buggy of the freckled boy's father, who served as livery-stable-keeper, to one or two melancholy summer boarding-houses on Creston Lake, and had discovered within driving distance a number of houses worthy of his pencil, and he said that he could not, while he was in the neighbourhood, give up the pleasure of seeing her as often as possible. When they took leave of each other, she promised to continue to be his guide, and during the fortnight which followed they roamed the hills in happy comradeship. In most of the village friendships between youths and maidens, lack of conversation was made up for by tentative fondling. But Harney, except when he had tried to comfort her and her trouble on their way back from the Hyatt's, had never put his arm about her, or sought to betray her into any sudden caress. It seemed to be enough for him to breathe her nearness like a flowers, and since his pleasure of being with her, and his sense of her youth and her grace, perpetually shone in his eyes and softened the inflection of his voice, his reserve did not suggest coldness, but the deference due to a girl of his own class. The buggy was drawn by an old trotter who whirled them along so briskly that the pace created a little breeze, but when they reached Hepburn the full heat of the airless morning descended on them. At the railway station the platform was packed with the sweltering throng, and they took refuge in the waiting-room, where there was another throng already dejected by the heat and the long waiting for the retarded trains. Pale mothers were struggling with fretful babies or trying to keep their older offspring from the fascination of the track. Girls and their fellows were giggling and shoving and passing about candy and sticky bags, and older men, colorless and perspiring, were shifting heavy children from one arm to the other, and keeping a haggard eye on the scattered members of their families. At last the train rumbled in and engulfed the waiting multitude. Harny swept Charity up onto the first car, and they captured a bench for two, and sat in happy isolation, while the train swayed and roared along through rich fields and languid tree-clumps. The haze of the morning had become a sort of clear tremor over everything, like the colorless vibration about a flame, and the opulent landscape seemed to droop under it. But to Charity the heat was a stimulant. It enveloped the whole world in the same glow that burned at her heart. Now and then a lurch of the train flung her against Harny, and through her thin muslin she felt the touch of his sleeve. She steadied herself, their eyes met, and the flaming breath of the day seemed to enclose them. The train roared into the Nettleton Station. The descending mob caught them on its tide, and they were swept out into a vague, dusty square, thronged with seedy hacks, and long, curtained omnibuses, drawn by horses with tasseled flynets over their withers, who stood swinging their depressed heads drurally from side to side. A mob of buss and hack-drivers were shouting, to the Eagle House, to the Washington House, this way to the lake, just starting for Grey Top, and through their yells came the popping of firecrackers, the explosion of torpedoes, the banging of toy guns, and the crash of a fireman's band trying to play the merry widow, while they were being packed into a wagonette, streaming with bunting. The ramshackle wooden hotels above the square were all hung with flags and paper lanterns, and as Harny and Charity turned into the main street, with its brick and granite business blocks crowding out the old, low-storied shops, and its towering poles strong with innumerable wires that seemed to tremble and buzz in the heat, they saw the double line of flags and lanterns, tapering away gaily to the park at the other end of the perspective. The noise and color of this holiday vision seemed to transform Nettleton into a metropolis. Charity could not believe that Springfield, or even Boston, had anything grander to show, and she wondered if, at this very moment, Annabelle Balch, on the arm of his brilliant young man, were threading her way through scenes as resplendent. Where shall we go first? Harny asked, but as she turned her happy eyes on him he guessed the answer and said, We'll take a look round, shall we? The street swarmed with her fellow-travelers, with other excursionists arriving from other directions, with Nettleton's own population, and with the mill-hands trooping in from the factories on the Cruston. The shops were closed, but one would scarcely have noticed so numerous were the glass doors swinging open on saloons, on restaurants, on drugstores gushing from every soda water tap, on fruit and confectionery shops stacked with strawberry cake, coconut drops, trays of glistening molasses candy, boxes of caramels and chewing gum, baskets of sodden strawberries, and dangling branches of bananas. Outside of some of the doors were trestles with banked-up oranges and apples, spotted pears and dusty raspberries, and the air reeked with the smell of fruit and stale coffee, beer and sasperilla and fried potatoes. Even the shops that were closed offered, through wide expanses of plate glass, hints of hidden riches. In some, waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moths from which ravishing hats rose like tropical orchids. In others, the pink throats of gramophones opened their giant convolutions in a soundless chorus, or bicycles shining in neat ranks seemed to await the signal of an invisible starter, or tears of fancy goods in leatherette and paste and celluloid dangled their insidious graces, and in one vast bay that seemed to project them into exciting contact with the public, waxed ladies in daring dresses chatted elegantly, or, with gestures intimate yet blameless, pointed to their pink corsets and transparent hosiery. Presently, Harney found that his watch had stopped, and turned in at a small jeweler's shop which chanced to still be open. While the watch was being examined, charity leaned over the glass counter where, on a background of dark blue velvet, pins, rings, and brooches glittered like the moon and stars. She had never seen jewelry so near by, and she longed to lift the glass lid and plunge her hand among the shining treasures. But already Harney's watch was repaired, and he laid his hand on her arm and drew her from her dream. "'Which do you like best?' he asked, leaning over the counter at her side. "'I don't know.' She pointed to a gold lily of the valley with white flowers. "'Don't you think the blue pins better?' he suggested, and immediately she saw that the lily of the valley was mere trumpery compared to the small, round stone, blue as a mountain lake, with the little sparkles of light all round it. She coloured at her want of discrimination. "'It's so lovely. I guess I was afraid to look at it,' she said. He laughed, and they went out of the shop, but a few steps away he exclaimed, "'Oh, by Jove I forgot something!' and turned back and left her in the crowd. She stood staring down a row of pink gramophone throats till he rejoined her, and slipped his arm through hers. You mustn't be afraid of looking at the blue pin any longer, because it belongs to you,' he said, and she felt a little box being pressed into her hand. Her heart gave a leap of joy, but it reached her lips only in a shy stammer. She remembered other girls whom she had heard planning to extract presents from their fellows, and was seized with a sudden dread, lest Harnie should have imagined, that she had leaned over the pretty things in the glass case, in the hope of having one given to her. A little farther down the street they turned in at a glass doorway, opening on a shining hall with a mahogany staircase, and brass cages in its corners. "'We must have something to eat,' Harnie said, and the next moment Charity found herself in a dressing-room, all looking glass and lustrous surfaces, where a party of showy-looking girls were dabbing on powder and straightening immense plumed hats. When they had gone she took courage to bathe her hot face in one of the marble basins, and to straighten her own hat-brim, which the parasols of the crowd had indented. The dresses in the shops had so impressed her that she scarcely dared look at her reflection, but when she did so the glow of her face under her cherry-coloured hat and the curve of her young shoulders through the transparent muslin restored her courage, and when she had taken the blue brooch from its box and pinned it on her bosom, she walked through the restaurant with her head high, as if she had always strolled through tessellated halls beside young men in flannels. Her spirit sank a little at the sight of the slim-waisted waitresses in black, with bewitching mob-caps on their haughty heads who were moving disdainfully between the tables. Up for another hour, one of them dropped to Harney in passing, and he stood doubtfully glancing about them. Oh, well, we can't stay sweltering here. He decided, let's try somewhere else, and with a sense of relief Charity followed him from that scene of inhospitable splendour. That somewhere else turned out, after more hot tramping and several failures, to be of all things a little open-air place in a back street that called itself a French restaurant and consisted in two or three rickety tables under a scarlet runner, between a patch of zinnias and petunias, and a big elm bending over from the next yard. Here they launched on queerly-flavoured things, while Harney, leaning back in a crippled rocking-chair, smoked cigarettes between the courses, and poured into Charity's glass a pale yellow wine, which he said was the very same one drank in just such jolly places in France. Charity did not think the wine is good as asperilla, but she sipped a mouthful for the pleasure of doing what he did, and of fancying herself alone with him in foreign countries. The illusion was increased by their being served by a deep, bosomed woman with smooth hair and a pleasant laugh, who talked to Harney in unintelligible words, and seemed amazed and overjoyed at his answering her in kind. At the other tables other people sat, mill hands probably, homely but pleasant-looking, who spoke the same shrill jargon, and looked at Harney and Charity with friendly eyes, and between the table-legs a poodle with bald patches and pink eyes nosed about for scraps, and sat up on his hind legs absurdly. Harney showed no inclination to move, for hot as their corner was, it was at least shaded and quiet, and from the main thoroughfares came the clanging of trolleys, the incessant popping of torpedoes, the jingle of street-organs, the bawling of megaphone-men, and the loud murmur of increasing crowds. He leaned back, smoking his cigar, patting the dog, and stirring the coffee that steamed in their chipped cups. "'It's the real thing, you know,' he explained, and Charity hastily revised her previous conception of the beverage. They had made no plans for the rest of the day, and when Harney asked her what she wanted to do next, she was too bewildered by rich possibilities to find an answer. Finally she confessed that she longed to go to the lake, where she had not been taken on her former visit, and when he answered, "'Oh, there's time for that. It will be pleasanter later.' She suggested seeing some pictures like the ones Mr. Miles had taken her to. She thought Harney looked a little disconcerted, but he passed his fine handkerchief over his warm brow, said gaily, come along, then, and rose with the last pat for the pink-eyed dog. Mr. Miles's pictures had been shown in an austere YMCA hall, with white walls and an organ, but Harney led Charity to a glittering place every thing she saw seemed to glitter, where they passed between immense pictures of yellow-haired beauties, stabbing villains in evening dress, into a velvet-curtained auditorium packed with spectators to the last limit of compression. After that for a while everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen, and scowling murderers, and the crowd around her, the hundreds of hot, sallow, candy-munching faces, young, old, little-aged, but all kindled with the same contagious excitement, became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with the rest. Presently the thought of the cool trolley run to the lake grew irresistible, and they struggled out of the theatre. As they stood on the pavement, Harney pale with the heat, and even Charity a little confused by it, a young man drove in an electric runabout with a calico band bearing the words, ten dollars to take you round the lake. Before Charity knew what was happening, Harney had waved a hand, and they were climbing in. Save for twenty-five, I'll run you out to see the ball-gaming back, the driver proposed with an insinuating grin, but Charity said quickly, oh, I'd rather go rowing on the lake. The street was so thronged that progress was slow, but the glory of sitting in the little carriage, while it wriggled its way between laden omnibuses and trolleys, made the moments seem too short. This turn is Lake Avenue, the young man called out over his shoulder, and as they paused in the wake of a big omnibus groaning with knights of Pythias in cocked hats and swords, Charity looked up and saw in the corner a brick house with a conspicuous black and gold sign across its front. Dr. Merkel, private consultations at all hours, lady attendance, she read, and suddenly she remembered Allie Haas's words. The house was at the corner of Wing Street and Lake Avenue. There was a big black sign across the front. Through all the heat and the rapture, a shiver of cold ran over her. CHAPTER X The lake at last, a sheet of shining metal brooded over by drooping trees. Charity and Harnie had secured a boat, and, getting away from the wharves and the refreshment booths, they drifted idly along, hugging the shadow of the shore. Where the sun struck the water, its shafts flamed back blindingly at the heat-failed sky, and the least shade was black by contrast. The lake was so smooth that the reflection of the trees on its edge seemed enameled on a solid surface, but gradually as the sun declined the water grew transparent, and Charity, leaning over, plunged her fascinated gaze into depths so clear that she saw the inverted treetops interwoven with the green growths of the bottom. They rounded a point at the farther end of the lake, and entering an inlet pushed their bow against a protruding tree-trunk. A green veil of willows overhung them, beyond the trees, wheat fields sparkled in the sun, and all along the horizon the clear hills throbbed with light. Charity leaned back in the stern, and Harnie unshipped the oars and lay in the bottom of the boat, without speaking. Ever since their meeting at the Creston Pool he had been subject to these brooding silences, which were as different as possible from the pauses when they ceased to speak, because words were needless. At such times his face wore the expression she had seen on it when she had looked in at him from the darkness, and again there came over her a sense of the mysterious distance between them. But usually his fits of abstraction were followed by bursts of gaity that chased away the shadow before it chilled her. She was still thinking of the ten dollars he had handed to the driver of the runabout. It had given them twenty minutes of pleasure, and it seemed unimaginable that anyone should be able to buy amusement at that rate. With ten dollars he might have bought her an engagement ring. She knew that Mrs. Tom Fryes, which came from Springfield, and had a diamond in it, had cost only eight seventy-five, but she did not know why the thought had occurred to her. Harnie would never buy her an engagement ring. They were friends and comrades, but no more. He had been perfectly fair to her. He had never said a word to mislead her. She wondered what the girl was like whose hand was waiting for his ring. Boats were beginning to thicken on the lake, and the clang of incessantly arriving trolleys announced the return of the crowds from the ball-field. The shadows lengthened across the pearl-grey water, and two white clouds near the sun were turning golden. On the opposite shore men were hammering hastily at a wooden scaffolding in a field. Charity asked what it was for. Why the fireworks? I suppose there will be a big show. Harnie looked at her, and a smile crept into his moody eyes. Have you never seen any good fireworks? Miss Hatchard always sends up lovely rockets on the fourth. She answered doubtfully. Oh! His contempt was unbounded. I mean a big performance, like this, illuminated boats and all the rest. She flushed at the picture. Do they send them up from the lake, too? Rather. Did you notice that big raft we passed? It's wonderful to see the rockets completing their orbits down under one's feet. She said nothing, and he put the oars into the rollox. If we stay, we'd better go and pick up something to eat. But how can we get back afterwards? She ventured, feeling it would break her heart if she missed it. He consulted a timetable, found a ten o'clock train, and reassured her. The moon rises so late that it will be dark by eight, and will have over an hour of it. High light fell, and lights began to show along the shore. The trolleys, roaring out from Nettleton, became great luminous serpents, quelling in and out among the trees. The wooden eating-houses at the lake's edge danced with lanterns, and the dusk echoed with laughter and shouts, and the clumsy splashing of oars. Harney and Charity had found a table in the corner of a balcony built over the lake, and were patiently awaiting an unattainable chowder. Close under them the water lapped the piles, agitated by the evolutions of a little white steamboat trellised with colored globes which was to run passengers up and down the lake. It was already black with them, as it sheared off on its first trip. Suddenly Charity heard a woman's laugh behind her. The sound was familiar, and she turned to look. A band of showly dressed girls and dapper young men wearing badges of secret societies, with new straw hats, tilted far back on their square-clipped hair, had invaded the balcony and were loudly clamouring for a table. The girl in the lead was the one who had laughed. She wore a large hat with a long white feather, and from under its brim her painted eyes looked to Charity with amused recognition. Say, if this ain't like Old Home Week," she remarked to the girl at her elbow, and giggles and glances passed between them. Charity knew at once that the girl with the white feather was Julia Hawes. She had lost her freshness, and the paint under her eyes made her face seem thinner. But her lips had the same lovely curve, and the same cold mocking smile as if there were some secret absurdity in the person she was looking at, and she had instantly detected it. Charity flushed to the forehead and looked away. She felt herself humiliated by Julia's sneer, and vexed that the mockery of such a creature should affect her. She trembled lest Harney should notice that the noisy troupe had recognized her, but they found no table free and passed on tumultuously. Presently there was a soft rush through the air, and a shower of silver fell from the blue evening sky. In another direction pale Roman candles shot up singly through the trees, and a fire-haired rocket swept the horizon like a portent. Between these intermittent flashes the velvet curtains of the darkness were descending, and in the intervals of eclips the voices of the crowds seemed to sink to smothered murmurs. Charity and Harney, dispossessed by newcomers, were length obliged to give up their table, and struggle through the throng about the boat-landings. For a while there seemed no escape from the tide of late arrivals. But finally Harney secured the last two places on the stand, from which the more privileged were to see the fireworks. The seats were at the end of a row, one above the other. Charity had taken off her hat to have an uninterrupted view, and whenever she leaned back to follow the curve of some dishevelled rocket she could feel Harney's knees against her head. After a while the scattered fireworks ceased, a longer interval of darkness followed, and then the whole night broke into flower. From every point of the horizon gold and silver arches sprang up and crossed each other. Sky orchards broke into blossom, shed their flaming petals, and hung their branches with golden fruit, and all the while the air was filled with the soft supernatural hum as though great birds were building their nests in those invisible treetops. Now and then there came a lull, and a wave of moonlight swept the lake. In a flash it revealed hundreds of boats, steel-dark against lustrous ripples. Then it withdrew as if with a furling of vast, translucent wings. Charity's heart throbbed with delight. It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her. She could not imagine that the world held anything more wonderful. But near her she heard some one say, You wait till you see the set-piece, and instantly her hopes took a fresh flight. At last, just as it was beginning to seem as though the whole arch of the sky were one great lid pressed against her dazzled eyeballs, and striking out of them continuous jets of jeweled light, the velvet darkness settled down again, and a murmur of expectation ran through the crowd. Now, now, the same voice said excitedly, and Charity, grasping the hat on her knee, crushed it tight in an effort to restrain her rapture. For a moment the night seemed to grow more impenetrably black, then a great picture stood out against it like a constellation. It was surmounted by a golden scroll bearing the inscription Washington crossing the Delaware, and across a flood of motionless golden ripples, the national hero passed, erect, solemn, and gigantic, standing with folded arms in the stern of a slowly moving golden boat. Along, ooooh, burst from the spectators. The stand creaked and shook with their blissful trepidations. Oh! Charity gasped. She had forgotten where she was, had at last forgotten even Harney's nearness. She seemed to have been caught up in the stars. The picture vanished, and darkness came down. In the obscurity she felt her head clasped by two hands. Her face was drawn backward, and Harney's lips were pressed on hers. With sudden vehemence he wound his arms about her, holding her head against his breast while she gave him back his kisses. An unknown Harney had revealed himself, a Harney who dominated her, and yet over whom she felt herself possessed of a new mysterious power. But the crowd was beginning to move, and he had released her. Come! he said in a confused voice. He scrambled over the side of the stand, and holding up his arm caught her as she sprang to the ground. He passed his arm about her waist, steadying her against the descending rush of people. And she clung to him, speechless, exultant, as if all the crowding and confusion about them were a mere vein stirring of the air. Come! he repeated, we must try to make the trolley. He drew her along, and she followed, still in her dream. They walked as if they were one, so isolated and ecstasy that the people jostling them on every side seemed impalpable. But when they reached the terminus the illuminated trolley was already clanging on its way, its platforms black with passengers. The cars waiting behind it were as thickly packed, and the throng about the terminus was so dense that it seemed hopeless to struggle for a place. Last trip up the lake, a megaphone bellowed from the wharf, and the lights of the little steamboat came dancing out of the darkness. No use waiting here. Shall we run up the lake? Herney suggested. They pushed their way back to the edge of the water, just as the gang-plank lowered from the white side of the boat. The electric light at the end of the wharf flashed full on the descending passengers, and among them Charity caught sight of Julia Hawes, her white feather askew, and the face under it flushed with coarse laughter. As she stepped from the gang-plank she stopped short, her dark ring dies darting malice. �Hello, Charity Royle� she called out, and then looking back over her shoulder. �Didn't I tell you it was a family party? Here's Grandpa's little daughter come to take him home.� A snigger ran through the group, and then towering above them, and steadying himself by the handrail in a desperate effort at erectness, Mr. Royle stepped stiffly ashore. Like the young men of the party he wore a secret society emblem in the buttonhole of his black frock-coat. His head was covered by a new Panama hat, and his narrow black tie, half undone, dangled down on his rumpled shirt-front. His face, a livid brown, with red blotches of anger, and lips sunken in like old mans, was a lamentable ruin in the searching glare. He was just behind Julia Hawes, and had one hand on her arm, but as he left the gang-plank he freed himself, and moved a step or two away from his companions. He had seen Charity at once, and his glance passed slowly from her to Harney, whose arm was still about her. He stood staring at them, and trying to master the senile quiver of his lips. Then he drew himself up with the tremulous majesty of drunkenness, and stretched out his arm. You whore! You damn, bare-headed whore, you!" he enunciated slowly. There was a scream of tipsy laughter from the party, and Charity involuntarily put her hands to her head. She remembered that her hat had fallen from her lap when she jumped up to leave the stand, and suddenly she had a vision of herself, hatless, dishevelled, with a man's arm about her, confronting that drunken crew, headed by her guardian's pitiable figure. The picture filled her with shame. She had known since childhood about Mr. Royal's habits, had seen him, as she went up to bed, sitting morosely in his office, a bottle at his elbow, or coming home heavy and quarrelsome from his business expeditions to Hepburn or Springfield, but the idea of his associating himself publicly with a band of disreputable girls and barrim loafers was new and dreadful to her. Oh! she said in a gasp of misery, and releasing herself from Harney's arm, she went straight up to Mr. Royal. You come home with me. You come right home with me! She said in a low, stern voice, as if she had not heard his apostrophe, and one of the girls called out, Say, how many fellers does she want? There was another laugh, followed by a pause of curiosity, during which Mr. Royal continued to glare at Charity, and length his twitching lips parted, I said, you damn whore! He repeated with precision, steadying himself on Julia's shoulder. Laughs and jeers were beginning to spring up from the circle of people beyond their group, and a voice called out from the gangway. Now then, step lively there, all aboard! The pressure of approaching and departing passengers forced the actors into the rapid scene apart, and pushed them back into the throng. Charity found herself clinging to Harney's arm, and sobbing desperately. Mr. Royal had disappeared, and in the distance she heard the receding sound of Julia's laugh. The boat, laid into the taffrail, was puffing away on her last trip. CHAPTER 11 At two o'clock in the morning the freckled boy from Creston stopped his sleepy horse at the door of the Red House, and Charity got out. Harney had taken leave of her at Creston River, charging the boy to drive her home. Her mind was still in a fog of misery, and she did not remember very clearly what had happened, or what they had said to each other during the interminable interval since their departure from Neddleton. But the secretive instinct of the animal in pain was so strong in her that she had a sense of relief when Harney got out, and she drove on alone. The full moon hung over North Dormer, whitening the mist that filled the hollows between the hills, and floated transparently above the fields. Charity stood a moment at the gate, looking out into the waning night. She watched the boy drive off, his horse's head wagging heavily to and fro. Then she went around to the kitchen door, and felt under the mat for the key. She found it, unlocked the door, and went in. The kitchen was dark, but she discovered a box of matches, lit a candle, and went upstairs. Mr. Royle's door, opposite hers, stood open on his unlit room, evidently he had not come back. She went into her room, bolted her door, and began slowly to untie the ribbon about her waist, and to take off her dress. Under the bed she saw the paper bag in which she had hidden her new hat, from inquisitive eyes. She lay for a long time sleepless on her bed, staring up the moon light on the low ceiling. Dawn was in the sky when she fell asleep, and when she woke the sun on her face. She dressed and went down to the kitchen. Verena was there alone. She glanced at Charity tranquilly, with her old, deaf-looking eyes. There was no sign of Mr. Royle about the house, and the hours passed without his reappearing. Charity had gone up to her room, and sat there listlessly. Puffs of sultry air fanned her dimity window-curtains, and flies buzzed stiflingly against the bluish panes. At one o'clock Verena hobbled up to see if she were not coming down to dinner, but she shook her head, and the old woman went away saying, I'll cover up, then. The sun turned and left her room, and Charity seated herself in the window, gazing down the village street through the half-open shutters. Not a thought was in her mind. It was just a dark whirlpool of crowding images, and she watched the people passing along the street. Dan targets team, hauling a load of pine-trunks down to Hepburn, the sexton's old white horse grazing on the bank across the way, as if she looked at these familiar sights from the other side of the grave. She was roused from her apathy by seeing Allie Hawes come out of the Fry's Gate, and walk slowly toward the red house with her uneven limping step. At the sight Charity recovered her severed contact with reality. She divined that Allie was coming to hear about her day. No one else was in the secret of the trip to Nettleton, and it flattered Allie profoundly to be allowed to know of it. At the thought of having to see her, of having to meet her eyes and answer or evade her questions, the whole horror of the previous night's adventure rushed back upon Charity. What had been a feverish nightmare became a cold and unescapable fact. Poor Allie at that moment represented North Dormer with all its mean curiosities, its furtive malice, its sham unconsciousness of evil. Charity knew that although all relations with Julia were supposed to be severed, the tender-hearted Allie still secretly communicated with her, and no doubt Julia would exalt in the chance of retailing the scandal of the wharf. The story exaggerated and distorted was probably already on its way to North Dormer. Allie's dragging pace had not carried her far from the Fry's Gate when she was stopped by old Mrs. Solace, who was a great talker and spoke very slowly because she had never been able to get used to her new teeth from Hepburn. Still even this respite would not last long. In another ten minutes Allie would be at the door, and Charity would hear her greeting Verena in the kitchen, and then calling up from the foot of the stairs. Only it became clear that flight, and instant flight, was the only thing conceivable. The longing to escape, to get away from familiar faces, from places where she was known, had always been strong in her, in moments of distress. She had a childish belief in the miraculous power of strange scenes and new faces to transform her life and wipe out bitter memories. But such impulses were mere fleeting whims compared to the cold resolve which now possessed her. She felt she could not remain an hour longer under the roof of the man who had publicly dishonored her, and face to face with the people who had presently be gloating over all the details of her humiliation. Her passing pity for Mr. Royal had been swallowed up in loathing. Everything in her recoiled from the disgraceful spectacle of the drunken old man, apostrophosizing her in the presence of a band of loafers and street-walkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration, now appeared to her as a vulgar incident into a debauched and degraded life. While these thoughts were hurrying through her, she had dragged out her old canvas school-bag, and was thrusting into it a few articles of clothing and the little packet of letters she had received from Harney. From under her pin-cushion she took the library-key, and laid it in full view, then she fell to the back of a drawer for the blue brooch that Harney had given her. She would not have dared to wear it openly at North Dormer, but now she fastened it on her bosom, as if it were a talisman to protect her in flight. These preparations taken but a few minutes, and when they were finished, Allie Hawes was still at the fries corner, talking to old Mrs. Solace. She had said to herself, as she always said in moments of revolt, I'll go to the mountain, I'll go back to my own folks. She had never really meant it before, but now, as she considered her case, no other course seemed open. She had never learned any trade that would have given her independence in a strange place, and she knew no one in the big towns of the valley where she might have hoped to find employment. Miss Hatchard was still away, but even had she been at North Dormer she was the last person to whom charity would have turned, since one of the motives urging her to flight was the wish not to see Lucius Harney. Travelling black from Neddleton in the crowded brightly lit train, all exchange of confidence between them had been impossible, but during their drive from Hepburn to Creston River she had gathered from Harney's snatches of consolatory talk, again hampered by the freckled boy's presence, that he intended to see her the next day. At the moment she had found herself a vague comfort in the assurance, but in the desolate lucidity of the hours that followed she had come to see the impossibility of meeting him again. Her dream of comradeship was over, and the scene on the wharf, vile and disgraceful as it had been, had, after all, shed the light of truth on her minute of madness. It was as if her guardian's words had stripped her bear in the face of the grinning crowd, and proclaimed to the world the secret admonitions of her conscience. She did not think these things out clearly, she simply followed the blind propulsion of her wretchedness. She did not want, ever again, to see anyone she had known. Above all, she did not want to see Harney. She climbed the hill-path behind the house and struck through the woods by a shortcut leading to the Creston Road. A lead-colored sky hung heavily over the fields, and in the forest the motionless air was stifling, but she pushed on, impatient to reach the road, which was the shortest way to the mountain. To do so she had to follow the Creston Road for a mile or two, and go within half a mile of the village. And she walked quickly, fearing to meet Harney, that there was no sign of him, and she had almost reached the Branch Road when she saw the flanks of a large white tent projecting through the trees by the roadside. She supposed that it sheltered a travelling circus which had come there for the fourth, but as she drew nearer she saw, over the folded back flap, a large sign bearing the inscription, Gospel Tent. The interior seemed to be empty, but a young man in a black alpaca coat, his lank hair parted over a round white face, stepped from under the flap, and advanced toward her with a smile. Sister, your Saviour knows everything. Won't you come in and lay your guilt before him? He asked insinuatingly, putting his hand on her arm. Charity started back and flushed. For a moment she thought the evangelist must have heard a report of the scene at Neddleton. Then she saw the absurdity of this supposition. I only wished I had any to lay, she retorted, with one of her fierce flashes of self-derision, and the young man murmured aghast, Oh, Sister, don't speak blasphemy! But she had jerked her arm out of his hold, and was running up the Branch Road, trembling with the fear of meeting a familiar face. Presently she was out of sight of the village, and climbing into the heart of the forest. She could not hope to do the fifteen miles to the mountain that afternoon, but she knew of a place half-way to Hamlin where she could sleep, and where no one would think of looking for her. It was a little deserted house on a slope in one of the lonely rifts of the hills. She had seen it once, years before, when she had gone on a nutting expedition to the grove of walnuts below it. The party had taken refuge in the house from a sudden mountain storm, and she remembered that Ben Solis, who liked frightening girls, had told him that it was said to be haunted. She was growing faint and tired, for she had eaten nothing since morning, and was not used to walking so far. Her head felt light, and she sat down for a moment by the roadside. As she sat there she heard the click of a bicycle bell, and started up to plunge back into the forest. But before she could move, the bicycle had swept around the curve of the road, and Harney, jumping off, was approaching her without stretched arms. Charity! What on earth are you doing here? She stared as if he were a vision. So startled by the unexpectedness of his being there, that no words came to her. Where were you going? Had you forgotten that I was coming? He continued, trying to draw her to him, but she shrank from his embrace. I was going away. I don't want to see you. I want you should leave me alone. She broke out wildly. He looked at her, and his face grew grave, as though the shadow of a premonition brushed it. Going away. From me, Charity? From everybody, I want you should leave me. He stood, glancing doubtfully up and down the lonely forest road that stretched away into sun-flecked distances. Where were you going? Home. Home. This way? She threw her head back defiantly, to my home, up yonder, to the mountain. As she spoke, she became aware of a change in his face. He was no longer listening to her. He was only looking at her, with the passionate, absorbed expression she had seen in his eyes after they had kissed on the stand at Neddleton. He was the new Harney again, the Harney abruptly revealed in that embrace, who seemed so penetrated with the joy of her presence that he was utterly careless of what she was thinking or feeling. He caught her hands with a laugh. How do you suppose I found you? He said gaily. He drew out the little packet of his letters, and flourished them before her bewildered eyes. You drop them, you imprudent young person. Drop them in the middle of the road, not far from here, and the young man who was running the gospel tent picked them up just as I was riding by. He drew back, holding her at arm's length, and scrutinizing her troubled face with the minute searching gaze of his short-sighted eyes. Did you really think you could run away from me? You see you weren't meant to, he said. But before she could answer, he had kissed her again, not vehemently, but tenderly, almost fraternally, as if he had guessed her confused pain, and wanted her to know he understood it. He wound his fingers through hers. Come, let's walk a little. I want to talk to you. There's so much to say. He spoke with a boy's gaity, carelessly and confidently, as if nothing had happened that could shame or embarrass them, and for a moment, in the sudden relief of her release, from lonely pain, she felt herself yielding to his mood. But he had turned, and was drawing her back along the road, by which she had come. She stiffened herself, and stopped short. I won't go back, she said. They looked at each other a moment in silence, then he answered gently, Very well, let's go the other way then. She remained motionless, gazing silently at the ground, and he went on, Isn't there a house up here somewhere, a little abandoned house? She meant to show me some day. Still she made no answer, and he continued, in the same tone of tender reassurance. Let us go there now, and sit down, and talk quietly. He took one of the hands that hung by her side, and pressed his lips to the palm. Do you suppose I'm going to let you send me away? Do you suppose I don't understand? The little old house, its wooden walls sun-bleached to a ghostly gray, stood in an orchard above the road. The garden palings had fallen, but the broken gate dangled between its posts, and the path to the house was marked by rose-bushes run wild and hanging their small pale blossoms above the crowding grasses. Slender pilasters and an intricate fan-light framed the opening where the door had hung, and the door itself lay rotting in the grass, with an old apple-tree falling across it. Inside also, wind and weather had blanched everything to the same wain silvery tint. The house was as dry and pure as the interior of a long empty shell, but it must have been exceptionally well built, for the little rooms had kept something of their human aspect. The wooden mantles with their neat classic ornaments were in place, and the corners of one ceiling retained a light film of plaster tracery. Harney had found an old bench at the back door, and dragged it into the house. Charity sat on it, leaning her head against the wall in a state of drowsy lassitude. He had guessed that she was hungry and thirsty, and had brought her some tablets of chocolate from his bicycle-bag, and filled his drinking-cup from a spring in the orchard, and now he sat at her feet, smoking a cigarette, and looking up at her without speaking. Outside the afternoon shadows were lengthening across the grass, and through the empty window-frame that faced her, she saw the mountain thrusting its dark mass against a sultry sunset. It was time to go. She stood up, and he sprang to his feet also, and passed his arm through hers with an air of authority. Now, Charity, you're coming back with me. She looked at him and shook her head. I ain't ever going back. You don't know. What don't I know? She was silent, and he continued. What happened on the wharf was horrible. It's natural you should feel as you do. But it doesn't make any real difference. You can't be hurt by such things. You must try to forget, and you must try to understand that men—men sometimes—I know about men. That's why. He collared a little at the retort, as though it had touched him in a way she did not suspect. Well, then, you must know one has to make allowances. He'd been drinking. I know all that, too. I've seen him so before. But he wouldn't have dared speak to me that way if he hadn't. Hadn't what? What do you mean? Hadn't wanted me to be like those other girls. She lowered her voice and looked away from him. Soced he wouldn't have to go out. Harney stared at her. For a moment he did not seem to seize her meaning. Then his face grew dark. The damned hound! The villainous low hound! His wrath blazed up, crimsoning him to the temples. I never dreamed, Good God, it's too vile! He broke off as if his thoughts recoiled from the discovery. I won't never go back there! She repeated doggedly. No, he assented. There was a long interval of silence, during which she imagined that he was searching her face, for more light on what she had revealed to him, and a flush of shame swept over her. I know the way you must feel about me, she broke out, telling you such things. But once more, as she spoke, she became aware that he was no longer listening. He came close and caught her to him, as if he were snatching her from some imminent peril. His impetuous eyes were in hers, and she could feel the heartbeat of his heart as he held her against it. Kiss me again, like last night," he said, pushing her hair back as if to draw her whole face up into his kiss. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Morning by Robin Cotter April 2007 Summer by Edith Wharton, CHAPTER XII One afternoon toward the end of August a group of girls sat in a room at Miss Hatchards, in a gay confusion of flags, turkey red, blue and white paper muslin, harvest sheaves, and illuminated scrolls. North Dormer was preparing for its old home week, that form of sentimental decentralization was still in its early stages, and precedents being few, and the desire to set an example contagious, the matter had become a subject of prolonged and passionate discussion under Miss Hatchards' roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchards' pale, prim drawing-room was the center of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield, and even more distant cities, and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls, deep in their pretty preparations. All the old names, all the old names, Miss Hatchard would be heard tapping across the hall in her crutches, Target, Solace, Frye, this is Miss Orma Frye sewing the stars and the drapery for the organ loft, don't move girls, and this is Miss Allie Hawes, our cleverest needle-woman, and Miss Charity Royal making her garlands of evergreen. I like the idea of its all being homemade, don't you? We haven't had to call in any foreign talent. My young cousin Lucius Harney, the architect, you know he's up here preparing a book on colonial houses. He's taken the whole thing in hand so cleverly, but you must come and see his sketch for the stage we're going to put up in the town hall. One of the first results of the old home-week agitation had, in fact, been the reappearance of Lucius Harney in the village street. He had been vaguely spoken of as being not far off, but for some weeks past no one had seen him at North Dormer, and there was a recent report of his having left, Creston River, where he was said to have been staying, and gone away from the neighbourhood for good. Soon after Miss Hatchard's return, however, he came back to his old quarters in her house, and began to take a leading part in the planning of the festivities. He threw himself into the idea with extraordinary good humour, and was so prodigal of sketches, and so inexhaustible in devices, that he gave an immediate impetus to the rather languid movement, and infected the whole village with his enthusiasm. Lucius has such a feeling for the past that he has roused us all to a sense of our privileges. Miss Hatchard would say, lingering on the last word, which was a favourite one, and before leading her visitor back to the drawing-room, she would repeat, for the hundredth time, that she supposed he thought it very bold of Little North Dormer to start up and have a home-week of its own, when so many bigger places hadn't thought of it yet. But that, after all, associations counted more than the size of the population, didn't they? And of course North Dormer was so full of associations—historic, literary, here, Ophelia Cypher Honorius, and Ecclesiastical. He knew about the old Peter Communion service imported from England in 1769, she supposed, and it was so important, in a wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of reverting to the old ideals, the family, and the homestead, and so on. This peroration usually carried her half-way back across the hall, leaving the girls to return to their interrupted activities. The day on which Charity Royal was weaving hemlock garlands for the procession was the last before the celebration. When Miss Hatchard called upon the North Dormer maidenhood to collaborate in the festival preparations, Charity had at first held aloof, but it had been made clear to her that her non-appearance might excite conjecture, and reluctantly she had joined the other workers. The girls, at first shy and embarrassed, had puzzled as to the exact nature of the projected commemoration, had soon become interested in the amusing details of their task, and excited by the notice they received. They would not for the world have missed their afternoons at Miss Hatchard's, and, while they cut out, and sewed, and draped, and pasted, their tongues kept up such an accompaniment to the sewing-machine, that Charity's silence sheltered itself, unperceived, under their chatter. In spirit she was still almost unconscious of the pleasant stir about her. Since her return to the Red House, on the evening of the day when Harney had overtaken her on her way to the mountain, she had lived at Northormer as if she were suspended in the void. She had come back there because Harney, after appearing to agree to the impossibility of her doing so, had ended by persuading her that any other course would be madness. She had nothing further to fear from Mr. Royall. Of this she had declared herself sure, though she had failed to add, in his exoneration, that he had twice offered to make her his wife. Her hatred of him made it impossible, at the moment, for her to say anything that might partly excuse him in Harney's eyes. Harney, however, once satisfied of her security, had found plenty of reasons for urging her to return. The first, and the most unanswerable, was that she had nowhere else to go. But the one on which he lay the greatest stress was that flight would be equivalent to a vowel. If, as it was almost inevitable, rumors of the scandalous scene in Nettleton should reach Northormer, how else would her disappearance be interpreted? Her guardian had publicly taken away her character, and she immediately vanished from his house. Seekers after motives could hardly fail to draw an unkind conclusion. But if she came back at once, and was seen leading her usual life, the incident was reduced to its true proportions, as the outbreak of a drunken old man furious at being surprised in disreputable company. People would say that Mr. Royle had insulted his ward to justify himself, and the sordid tale would fall into its place in the chronicle of his obscure debaucheries. Charity saw the force of the argument, but if she acquiesced it was not so much because of that as because it was Harney's wish. Since that evening in the deserted house she could imagine no reason for doing or not doing anything except the fact that Harney wished or did not wish it. All her tossing contradictory impulses were merged in a fatalistic acceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in him any ascendancy of character. There were moments already when she knew she was the stronger, but that all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim about the central glory of their passion. After she stopped thinking about that for a moment she felt that she sometimes did after lying on the grass and staring up too long at the sky. Her eyes were so full of light that everything about her was a blur. Each time that Miss Hatchard, in the course of her periodical incursions into the work room, dropped an illusion to her young cousin, the architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she was wearing fell to her knees, and she sat in a kind of trance. It was so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney in that familiar possessive way as if she had any claim on him or knew anything about him. She, Charity Royal, was the only being on earth who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpled crest of his hair, knew the shifting lights in his eyes and the inflections of his voice, and the things he liked and disliked, and everything there was to know about him, as minutely and yet unconsciously as a child knows the walls of the room it wakes up in every morning. It was this fact which nobody about her guessed, or would have understood, that made her life something apart and inviolable, as if nothing had any power to hurt or disturb her as long as her secret was safe. The room in which the girl sat was the one which had been Harney's bedroom. He had been sent upstairs to make room for the home-week workers, but the furniture had not been moved, and as Charity sat there she had perpetually before her the vision she had looked in on from the midnight garden. The table at which Harney had sat was the one about which the girls were gathered, and her own seat was near the bed on which she had seen him lying. Sometimes when the others were not looking she bent over as if to pick up something and laid her cheek for a moment against the pillow. Towards sunset the girls disbanded, their work was done, and the next morning at daylight the draperies and garlands were to be nailed up and the illuminated scrolls put in place in the town hall. The first guests were to drive over from Hepburn in time for the midday banquet under a tent in Miss Hatchard's field, and after that the ceremonies were to begin. Miss Hatchard, pale with fatigue and excitement, thanked her young assistants and stood in the porch, leaning on her crutches and waving a farewell as she watched them troop away down the street. Charity had slipped off among the first, but at the gate she heard Allie Hawes calling after her, and reluctantly turned. "'Will you come over now and try on your dress?' Allie asked, looking at her with wistful admiration. "'I want to be sure the sleeves don't ruck up the same as they did yesterday.' Allie gazed at her with dazzled eyes. "'Oh, it's lovely,' she said, and hastened away without listening to Allie's protest. She wanted her dress to be as pretty as the other girls, wanted it, in fact, to outshine the rest, since she was to take part in the exercises, but she had no time just then to fix her mind on such matters. She sped up the street to the library, of which she had the key about her neck. During the passage at the back she dragged forth the bicycle, and guided it to the edge of the street. She looked about to see if any of the girls were approaching, but they had drifted away together toward the town hall, and she sprang into the saddle, and turned toward the Creston Road. There was an almost continual descent to Creston, and with her feet against the petals, she floated through the still evening air, like one of the hawks she had often watched slanting downward, unmotionless wings. Twenty minutes from the time when she had left Miss Hatchard's door, she was turning up the wood road on which Harney had overtaken her on the day of her flight, and a few minutes afterward she had jumped from her bicycle at the gate of the deserted house. In the gold-powdered sunset it looked more than ever like some frail shell dried and washed by many seasons, but at the back, with her charity advanced, drawing her bicycle after her, there were signs of recent habitation. A rough door made of boards hung in the kitchen doorway, and pushing it open she entered a room furnished in primitive camping fashion. In the window was a table, also made of boards, with an earthenware jar holding a big bunch of wild asters. Two canvas chairs stood nearby, and in one corner was a mattress with a Mexican blanket over it. The room was empty, and leaning her bicycle against the house, charity clambered up the slope and sat down on a rock under an old apple tree. The air was perfectly still, and from where she sat she would be able to hear the tinkle of a bicycle bell a long way down the road. She was always glad when she got to the little house before Harney. She liked to have time to take in every detail of its secret sweetness. The shadows of the apple trees swaying on the grass, the old walnuts rounding their domes below the road, the meadows sloping westward in the afternoon light, before his first kiss blotted it all out. Everything unrelated to the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as the remembrance of a dream. The only reality was the wondrous unfolding of her new self, the reaching out to the light of all her contracted tendrils. She had lived all her life among people whose sensibilities seemed to have withered for lack of use, and more wonderful at first than Harney's endearments were the words that were a part of them. She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air. On the moral of the day when she had shown him the way to the deserted house, he had packed up and left Creston River for Boston, but at the first station he had jumped on the train with a handbag and scrambled up into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks he had camped in the house, getting eggs and milk from the solitary farm in the valley where no one knew him, and doing his cooking over a spirit lamp. He got up every day with the sun, took a plunge in the brown pool he knew of, and spent long hours lying in the scented hemlock woods above the house, or wandering along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the misty blue valleys that swept away east and west between the endless hills, and in the afternoon charity came to him. With part of what was left of her savings she had hired a bicycle for a month, and every day after dinner, as soon as her guardian started to his office, she hurried to the library, got out her bicycle, and flew down the Creston Road. She knew that Mr. Royle, like everyone else in North Dormer, was perfectly aware of her acquisition, possibly he, as well as the rest of the village, knew what use she made of it. She did not care. She felt him to be so powerless that if he had questioned her she would probably have told him the truth, but they had never spoken to each other since the night on the wharf at Neddleton. He had returned to North Dormer only on the third day after that encounter, arriving just as Charity and Verena were sitting down to supper. He had drawn up his chair, taken his napkin from the side-board drawer, pulled it out of his ring, and seated himself as unconcernedly as if he had come in from his usual afternoon session at Carrick Fry's. And the long habit of the household made it seem almost natural that Charity should not so much as raise her eyes when he entered. She had simply let him understand that her silence was not accidental by leaving the table while he was still eating, and going up without a word to shut herself in her room. After that he formed the habit of talking loudly and genially to Verena whenever Charity was in the room, but otherwise there was no apparent change in their relations. She did not think connectedly of these things while she sat waiting for Harnie, but they remained in her mind as a sullen background against which her short hours with him flamed out like forest fires. Nothing else mattered, neither the good nor the bad, or what might have seemed so before she knew him. He had caught her up and carried her away into a new world from which, at stated hours, the ghost of her came back to perform certain customary acts, but all so thinly and insubstantially that she sometimes wondered that the people she went about among could see her. Behind the swarthy mountain the sun had gone down in waveless gold, from a pasture up the slope, a tinkle of cowbells sounded, a puff of smoke hung over the farm in the valley, trailed on the pure air, and was gone. For a few minutes in the clear light that is all shadow, fields and woods were outlined with an unreal precision, then the twilight blotted them out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under its wizened apple branches. Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night, after a day of ratings, often gave her a sense of hidden menace. It was like looking out over the world as it would be when love had gone from it. She wondered if some day she would sit in that same place and watch in vain for her lover. His bicycle bell sounded down the lane, and in a minute she was at the gate and his eyes were laughing in hers. They walked back through the long grass and pushed open the door behind the house. The room at first seemed quite dark, and they had to grope their way in, hand in hand. Through the window frame the sky looked light by contrast, and above the black mass of asters in the earthen jar one white star glimmered like a moth. There was such a lot to do with the last minute, Harnie was explaining, and I had to drive down to Creston to meet someone who has come to stay with my cousin for the show. He had his arms about her, and his kisses were in her hair and on her lips. Under his touch things deep down in her struggled to the light and sprang up like flowers in sunshine. She twisted her fingers into his, and they sat down side by side on the improvised couch. She hardly heard his excuses for being late. In his absence a thousand doubts tormented her, but as soon as he appeared she ceased to wonder where he had come from, what had delayed him, who had kept him from her. It seemed as if the places he had been in and the people he had been with must cease to exist when he left them, just as her own life was suspended in his absence. He continued, now to talk to her volubly and gaily, deploring his lateness, grumbling at the demands on his time, and good-humorly mimicking Miss Hatchard's benevolent agitation. She hurried off miles to ask Mr. Royle to speak at the town hall tomorrow. I didn't know till it was done. Charity was silent, and he added, after all, perhaps it's just as well. No one else could have done it. Charity made no answer. She did not care what part her guardian played in the Moro's ceremonies. Like all the other figures peopling her meager world he had grown non-existent to her. She had even put off hating him. Tomorrow I shall only see you from far off," Harney continued, but in the evening there will be the dance in the town hall. Do you want me to promise not to dance with any other girl? Any other girl? Were there any others? She had forgotten even that peril. So enclosed did he and she seem in their secret world. Her heart gave a frightened jerk. Yes. Promise! He laughed and took her in his arms. You goose! Not even if they're hideous? He pushed the hair from her forehead, bending her face back, as his way was, and leaning over her so that his head loomed black between her eyes and the paleness of the sky, in which the white star floated. Side by side they sped back along the dark wood road to the village. A late moon was rising, full-orbed and fiery, turning the mountain ranges from fluid gray to a mass of blackness, and making the upper sky so light that the stars looked as faint as their own reflections in water. At the edge of the wood, half a mile from North Dormer, Harney jumped from his bicycle, took Charity in his arms for a last kiss, and then waited while she went on alone. They were later than usual, and instead of taking the bicycle to the library, she propped it against the back of the woodshed and entered the kitchen of the red house. Nina sat there alone. When Charity came in, she looked at her with mild, impenetrable eyes, and then took a plate and a glass of milk from the shelf, and set them silently on the table. Charity nodded her thanks, and sitting down fell hungrily upon her piece of pie, and emptied the glass. Her face burned with her quick flight through the night, and her eyes were dazzled by the twinkle of the kitchen lamp. She felt like a night-bird suddenly caught and caged. She ain't come back since supper, Vereena said. He's down to the hall. Charity took no notice. Her soul was still winging through the forest. She washed her plate and tumbler, and then felt her way up the dark stairs. When she opened her door, a wonderer rested her. Before going out she had closed her shutters against the afternoon heat, but they had swung partly open, and a bar of moonlight crossing the room rested on her bed, and showed a dress of china silk laid out on it in virgin whiteness. Charity had spent more than she could afford on the dress, which was to surpass those of all the other girls. She had wanted to let North Dormer see that she was worthy of Harney's admiration. Above the dress, folded on the pillow, was the white veil which the young women who took part in the exercises were to wear under a wreath of masters, and beside the veil a pair of slim, white, satin shoes that Allie had produced from an old trunk in which she stored mysterious treasures. Charity stood gazing at all the outspread whiteness. It recalled a vision that had come to her in the night after her first meeting with Harney. She no longer had such visions. Warmer splendors had displaced them. But it was stupid of Allie to have paraded all those white things on her bed, exactly as Hattie Target's wedding dress from Springfield had been spread out for the neighbors to see when she married Tom Frye. Charity took up the satin shoes and looked at them curiously. By day, no doubt, they would appear a little worn, but in the moonlight they seemed carved of ivory. She sat down on the floor to try them on, and they fitted her perfectly, though when she stood up she lurched a little on the high heels. She looked down at her feet, which the graceful mould of the slippers had marvelously arched and narrowed. She had never seen such shoes before, even in the shop windows at Neddleton. Never, except—yes, once—she had noticed a pair of the same shape on Annabelle Balge. A blush of mortification swept over her. Allie sometimes sewed for Miss Balge when that brilliant being descended on North Dormer, and no doubt she picked up presents of cast-off clothing. The treasures in the mysterious trunk all came from the people she worked for. There could be no doubt that the white slippers were Annabelle Balches. As she stood there staring down moodily at her feet, she heard the triple click-click-click of a bicycle bell under her window. It was Harney's secret signal as he passed on his way home. She stumbled to the window on her high heels, flung open the shutters, and leaned out. He waved to her and sped by, his black shadow dancing merrily ahead of him, down the empty moonlit road, and she leaned there watching him, till he vanished under the hatchered spruces. End of CHAPTER XII