"What did you say?" he asked, recalling her from her reverie of him. "Oh!" she said; "only this--maybe he won't feel like coming around here any more. You know you practically sent him away." The judge gave a little laugh. "I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I'll leave it to you--or to them." Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the door-knob, and then hesitated. His smile had vanished. "She's so young," he said with a regret. "She's so young. How old did you say you were when we were married?" "Eighteen," Mrs. Blair replied. "And Lavinia can't be more than--" "Why, she's twenty," said Mrs. Blair. "So she is," said the judge. "So she is. But then you--" Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood picking a bit of thread from his shoulder. "It was different with us, wasn't it, dear?" she said, looking up at him. He kissed her. CHAPTER XIII SUMMER The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting its fine powder on the leaves of the cottonwoods that grew at the weedy gutter. The grass in the yard grew long, and the bushes languished in the heat. Judge Blair's beans clambered up their poles and turned white; and Connie's sweet peas grew lush and rank, running, as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green shutters were closed. In the evening dim figures could be seen on the veranda, and the drone of voices could be heard. At eleven o'clock, the deep siren of the Limited could be heard, as it rounded the curve a mile out of town. After that it was still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast, immeasurable. The clock in the Court House tower boomed out the heavy hours. Sometimes the harmonies of the singing negroes were borne over the town. And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and those evenings of purple shadows and soft brilliant stars, were but the setting of a dream that unfolded new wonders constantly. They were but a part of all life, a part of the glowing summer itself, innocent of the thousand artificial demands man has made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had come to her and a new beauty; all at once, suddenly, as it were, character had set its noble mark upon her, and about her slender figure there was the aureola of romance. "Have you noticed Lavinia?" Mrs. Blair asked her husband. "No, why?" he said, in the alarm that was ever ready to spring within him. "She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!" One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash from her finger, and he peered anxiously over his glasses. "What's that, Lavinia?" he asked, and when she stood at his knee, almost like a little girl again in all but spirit, he took her finger. "A ring," she said simply. "What does it mean?" "Glenn gave it to me." "Glenn?" "Yes."