His eyes and throat felt so funny that he thought maybe he was going to cry, but he choked back the tears angrily and hurried on through the spring evening watching the nighthawks skimming low over the houses, and the strange, soft flight of the bats. The wind sighed in the newly feathered elms and the arc-lights sputtered menacingly. He felt incredibly alone, infinitely removed from the rest of the world. No other boy in history had been so suddenly and deeply in love, so troubled and filled with foreboding. He had never known such a hurt as he now felt in his breast, such an unbelievable longing, although for what he could not say. Long before eight he was standing at the post office corner, and there he stood in the mist until long after nine. Maxine did not come. CHAPTER IV 1 On the Brailsford farm the season rushed tumultuously into June bringing honey-locust bloom, wild roses, blue spiderwort and vetch, changing black fields to the geometrical green of growing corn, transforming Attila, the black pony colt with his white star and fiery eyes into a frisking, mischievous rascal who worried his mother constantly, metamorphosing the Jersey calves from fawn-eyed babies delicate as gazelles into willful stubborn young ladies who butted their pails of skim milk all over the barn lot. "You little she-devils," said Gus, "you carnsarned little hussies, keep your heads in your own pails and try to learn some table manners." But either Gus was never cut out for a barnyard Emily Post, or the husky young heifers, shoats, and foals didn't give a tinker's damn which was the salad fork, for certainly to the most casual observer it was obvious that the little pigs thoroughly enjoyed wallowing in the delicious swill that filled their feeding troughs, loved to hang on squealing and complaining while their matronly mothers wandered aimlessly about the pig yard, and had no objection to nosing through the fence for a sinful afternoon among the radishes, peas, and lettuce of the garden plot. Attila, with forefeet braced, tugged at the mare's black udders until she sometimes turned and nipped his downy hide, and once when the foolhardy little colt started nuzzling around his daddy's flank, the Admiral, insulted to the very core of his masculine being, kicked and bit his tactless son into temporary good behavior. Nor were the black kittens in the barn above stealing milk from the brimming milk pails. Peter, his imagination soaring at the thought of a trailer factory in Brailsford Junction, dreamed through the corn on the sulky cultivator, went through the whole eighty acres of waving green, then started through it again in an endless battle against the weeds. Early Ann picked half a milk pail full of wild strawberries on a southern slope.