After a day in the house she went to walk at nightfall, in the dusk of the last twilight hour. People were assembled about the reading-lamps of the firesides, for the shades were not yet drawn and she could see into the houses. Little children were running before the firelight, their heads just reaching above the low window sills. It had been county court day and the town had been filled with busy people and the clatter of pleasant noises. Albert had been everywhere about, talking with the growers, and he had made a speech from the court-house steps. Forty per cent of the farmers had already been pledged to the measure, he had told her, and he would count eighty per cent an assured success, his eyes forgetful of her when he made the declaration, his eyes resting upon her without seeing. “You would eat his per cents from his hand,” now she said.
Footsteps came from the deeply shadowed pavement before her, going steps, receding quickly. The drama of the darkening town was but lightly held together, as if she could break it with a laugh. She walked briskly through an upper street thinking of her friends and of Catherine’s going. She had from each, she reflected, what each held out to her, and her music counted richly for something. A long strange gloom was settling over the rolling hills beyond the town where the fields and the pastures lay, a gloom lit withthe strange light from a low-bent horizon, vividly burnt to orange and black-red. The town was the dark core around which the fields centered. Albert was whispering his wish and his intention, growing daily more sure and more restless. All day the town had been the leaping, out-crying center of the farmed acres, the traders shouting their musical incantations over the mounting prices of cattle and mules, and Albert had summarized many goods as he had stood before her to make his speech from the court-house, had set a hilltop upon the day and upon the plowed fields. “In less than two weeks,” he had said the night before, and the week was well begun. “The kind of lover you’ll want.”
All about, up and down the street, were remote sounds of retreating steps, coming steps, voices that cried out in low commands or questions, but they said nothing for her beyond the abundant drama of their passing. She moved in a richness and fullness of sensation, cloaked in sense, or the pleasure of setting her feet forward swiftly drowned all thought in momentary pools of physical being. Or, standing at the gate after the walk, having heard the click of the gate latch which always meant the end of a journey, the peculiar sound of the gate when it was closed from within the garden, a deep metal click, alto, unlike that of any other gate she knew, a token of possible finalities came into her thought and her bodily presence. Albert gathered the fields together and centered them, but in turn he centered himself into her body. The parallels of thestreet converged far down in the west at the line the set sun made with the hills. The cool of the night touched her face and a shiver passed over her body, less of cold than of emotion deeply established as she recognized some unity within herself which related to her friends, to Albert’s wish, to Conway’s gentleness and beauty, and a clear thought of Conway brought a smile to her lips.
“This is my spirit, my soul. It’s here,” she said. “This unit. I can almost touch it with my words.” Dark had come now. The lights of the town were burning in order, one after the other up the street. She passed up the steps of the gallery slowly.