A girl
        came out
               of lawyer Royall's house,
           at the end
               of the
             one street
               of North Dormer,
         and stood on the doorstep.

    It was the beginning
           of a June afternoon.

    The springlike transparent sky
          shed a rain
               of silver sunshine
             on the roofs
                   of the village,
           and on the pastures
               and larchwoods
              surrounding it.

    A little wind
           moved among
               the round white clouds
             on the shoulders
                   of the hills,
           driving their shadows
               across the fields and
             down the grassy road
             that takes the name
                   of street
             when it passes
                   through North Dormer.

    The place
          lies high and
               in the open,
           and lacks the lavish shade
               of the more
              protected New England villages.

    The clump of weeping-willows
           about the duck pond,
         and the Norway spruces
               in front
                   of the Hatchard gate,
         cast almost the
              only roadside shadow
                   between lawyer Royall's house
                       and the point where,
           at the
               other end of the village,
         the road
              rises above the church
                  and skirts
                       the black hemlock wall
                     enclosing the cemetery.

    The little June wind,
           frisking down the street,
         shook the doleful fringes
               of the Hatchard spruces,
           caught the straw hat
               of a young man just
              passing under them,
         and spun it clean
               across the road
                   into the duck-pond.

    As he
        ran to fish it
               out the girl
                   on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed
         that he was a stranger,
           that he wore city clothes,
         and that
             he was
                  laughing with all his teeth,
           as the young
               and careless laugh
             at such mishaps.

    Her heart contracted a little,
           and the shrinking
             that sometimes came over her
               when she saw
                   people with holiday faces
                       made her draw
                           back into the house
                  and pretend
                      to look for the key
                 that she knew
                     she had already
                          put into her pocket.

    A narrow greenish mirror
           with a gilt eagle
         over it
          hung on the passage wall,
           and she looked
               critically at her reflection,
         wished for the thousandth time
             that she
                had blue eyes
                       like Annabel Balch,
           the girl
             who sometimes
                came from Springfield
                      to spend a week
                           with old Miss Hatchard,
         straightened the sunburnt hat
               over her small swarthy face,
           and turned out
              again into the sunshine.

    "How I hate everything!"

    she murmured.

    The young man
        had passed
               through the Hatchard gate,
           and she
            had the street to herself.

    North Dormer
        is at all
              times an empty place,
           and at three o'clock
               on a June afternoon its
                   few able-bodied men
            are off in the fields
                  or woods,
         and the women indoors,
           engaged in languid household drudgery.

    The girl walked along,
           swinging her key
               on a finger,
          and looking
               about her
                   with the heightened attention
              produced by the presence
                   of a stranger
                 in a familiar place.

    What,
           she wondered,
         did North Dormer look
               like to people
                   from other parts
                       of the world?

    She herself had lived there
         since the age of five,
           and had long supposed it
              to be a place
                   of some importance.

    But about a year before,
           Mr. Miles,
         the new Episcopal clergyman
               at Hepburn,
           who drove
               over every other Sunday
         --when the roads
         were not ploughed
             up by hauling--
            to hold a service
               in the North Dormer church,
           had proposed,
         in a fit
               of missionary zeal,
           to take the young people
               down to Nettleton
              to hear an illustrated
                   lecture on the Holy Land;
        and the dozen girls
               and boys
             who represented the future
                   of North Dormer
                had been
                      piled into a farm-waggon,
           driven over the hills
               to Hepburn,
         put into a way-train and
              carried to Nettleton.

    In the course of
         that incredible
               day Charity Royall had,
           for the first and
              only time,