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 with the 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.”