On Wednesday evening Richard returned, having kept himself away since Tuesday afternoon. He had said nothing to his mother about Eleanor or her books or her piano. He had been making vague plans. Certain expressions of his mother's came back to him; a sigh when he sat down at the piano, and an unflattering opinion of Thomasina's finger exercises, heard by Mrs. Lister as she passed the house. Thomasina, she had said, had been "tinkling and banging," two favorite words from her small musical vocabulary. Richard felt that the time was not propitious. He would wait a day or two until the confusion in his mind had given place to those even and regular processes which had always been his. He found Eleanor seated on the upper step of the porch, trying to read by the failing light, and he sat down and leaned against the other pillar from where he could watch her. She told him what she had been doing, how she had practiced--this a little wistfully--all the morning, and how she had found that Dr. Green had sat in his carriage listening to her for dear knows how long. "He's a funny soul," said Eleanor. "He's always bossing me and correcting me, but I love him. Aren't you very fond of him?" "I don't know that I am," said Richard, conscious of a sudden cooling of whatever emotion he had felt toward Dr. Green. "Well, I am," said Eleanor. "Did you ever hear how he disposes of his books?" "No." "If he begins a book and doesn't like its theories, he drops it into his waste-basket. Then his Virginia carefully fishes it out and carries it down to the cabins. She has a lot of shelves made of soap-boxes, and there stand Billings on the Eye and Jackson on Bones and Piatt on dear knows what." Eleanor talked easily and well. Her teachers and her friend Miss Thomasina and her acquaintance Mr. Utterly would have been astonished to hear her. It seemed to her that some confining band within her had parted and that she was expanding out of the former compass of her body and her mind. She talked about the moonlight, about the lovely valley, about the poetry she had been reading. Suddenly she turned to Richard. "What are you going to do this fall?" "I'm going to study music." Richard woke from a trance to his uneasy thoughts. "How lovely!" Eleanor sighed. She was beginning to know him and now he would go away; he would become famous, he would forget her entirely. To her came also a determination to be more devoted to her work, to grow as he grew. "When are you going away?" "In the fall." "And where will you study?" "In New York, with Faversham." "Miss Thomasina's friend?" "Yes." "How fortunate you are!" Eleanor meant not only that he was fortunate to be able to do as he pleased, but that he was fortunate to be Richard. "Then you'll forget all about Waltonville."