Albert too was a weariness, set far back and left when she had gone into the region about the yellow half-wit, Stiggins. She refused to ride with him when he asked her to go. He had stood at the house door gravely pleading that the day was warm and bright. His strong limbs offered her ease as he stood there before the bright warmth of the sun. Distracted, she waited beside her grandfather’s door, listening to his argument, but she gave a negative reply. Standing there, she wanted suddenly to go into his breast and rest. Her eyes clung a moment to his large clean bosom where a single intention dwelt, clung to his strong hands. She went back into Anthony’s room shaking her head, closing the door after her. * * * * * Catherine Lovell was going away to live in another town and her going began to leave a mark upon the days of the season even before it was consummated at a point upon some exact day. Her going spread through the week that preceded it and gave it a heightened reality, touching it with a not altogether unpleasant sense of disaster. For the last time the rugs were rolled back in the Lovell parlors and the musicians sat in the outer hall. Knowing it to be the last, the dancers were tender and gay, bending toward the departure with heightened beings. Theodosia was more intensely aware of Catherine in her leaving, her affection for her running in a full tide that ran counter to her recent unrest and swept this into its own channel. There was abundant virtue in a Bell then, and with Conway she walked lightly on the rhythms of Hill Street, adoring him in the moment of Catherine’s going. She worked all morning over the fiddle or the harmony, Catherine’s departure giving her faculties intense acumen so that the chords dripped from her pencil-tip and spread over the sheets of lined paper and her lips hummed phrases that played over the chords and departed from them in airy flights of inconsequential song, never returning. Ruth Robinson had brought her a gift of spring blossoms and Jane Moore had come to talk of how much Catherine would be missed. Intensities of affection welled all around her. Albert in the dance, settling his fingers to steady her in the step, had whispered again, “Two weeks now I give you. I’ll close in against next week is done.” They were a warmth of life touching her life minutely. They excluded fear with the warm touch of their nearness.