"No wonder yer couldn't sleep in it, with her curse on the big empty halls! When the crops themselves died the night afterward, without a sign of a frost comin' down to touch them! It was the devil's own guilt in her that did it, Al says. Poor man! poor man! And yer tried ter dress it all up like a corpse, as if yer thought it was dead; but it came to life on yer, did it?" he mumbled, laughing incomprehensibly to himself. "When yer leavin'? To-morrer? Sooner the better fer yer, I guess. Good-day." With which imprecation the old man turned, feebly put on his hat, and dragged himself back down the avenue whence he had come. They saw the last vestige of him disappear forever. "He's like a broken spirit brooding over the neighborhood," Hastings said, shivering despite himself. Julia began to crochet again, nervously absorbed in what she was doing. "His scattered, crazy words are like the last gasp of the little village. How he epitomizes all the cramped, pent-up emotions of the starved inhabitants who have gone--all the passions that must have so drearily burnt themselves out here, with nothing to note but the shifting of the winds or the digging of some well! They who were obliged, from sheer ennui, to create dramas out of their Puritan prejudices. Can't you breathe contagion in the very atmosphere? Julia, I've had enough of it; I'm glad we're going. If I stayed here a month longer, I should get to feel as indigenous as that gnarled old apple-tree; the ghosts of the soil would claim me." She stood up and walked away from him across the gravel avenue, as if doing so might help her to seize this occasion for what she had decided at last to tell him. She realized that she must be quick, that in another hour her parents' return might end this one good opportunity for which she had longed and waited. "Jack dear," she said, moving back toward him, seeing how her own excitement was reflected in the way he, too, had arisen and taken a few steps towards her, "to-morrow is our last day, and there's something that we must talk about before we go." His head was bowed, his eyes focused tensely up at hers, his arms hanging beside him; the sensitive smile hovered more and more dimly on his lips; his whole body swayed imperceptibly, like the beating of a pulse. "Jack," she got out, going still closer to him, "I want to show you--Mrs. Eberdeen's room." He would never quite realize the fullness of the shock it gave him; no deliberate attack could have been so vulnerably aimed, and the completeness of the blow was the greater for being one which he had been unwittingly preparing all along to receive. The house looked miles away; far over it three ducks flew southward.