"Oh, please do! We're dying to hear you. You didn't leave your music at home, did you?" Marley heard the chairs scraping on the veranda, and the screen door slammed once more. Then he heard Captain Carter go up the stairs, while Mrs. Carter halted in the doorway of the parlor long enough to say: "You lock the front door when you come up, Mayme." Mayme without turning replied "All right," and when her mother had disappeared she said: "It's awful hot in here, let's go outside." Marley found himself strolling in the yard with Lavinia Blair. The moon had not risen, but the girl's throat and arms gleamed in the starlight; her white dress seemed to be a cloud of gauze; she floated, rather than walked, there by his side. They paused by the gate. About them were the voices of the summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the frogs, chirping musically. They stood a while in the silence, and then they turned, and were talking again. Marley did most of the talking, and all he said was about himself, though he did not realize that this was so. He had already told her of his life in the towns where his father had preached before he came to Macochee, and of his four years in college at Delaware. He tried to give her some notion of the sense of alienation he had felt as the son of an itinerant Methodist minister; for him no place had ever taken on the warm color and expression of home. He explained that as yet he knew little of Macochee, having been away at college when his father moved there the preceding fall. It was so easy to talk to her, and as he told her of his ambitions, the things he was going to do became so many, and so easy. He was going to become a lawyer; he thought he should go to Cincinnati. "And leave Macochee?" said Lavinia Blair. Marley caught his breath. "Would you care?" he whispered. She did not answer. He heard the crickets, the katydids, the frogs again; there came the perfume of the lilacs, late flowering that year; the heavy odor of a shrub almost overpowered him. "My father is a lawyer," Lavinia said. They had turned off the path, and were wandering over the lawn. The dew sparkled on it; and Marley became solicitous. "Won't you get your feet wet?" he asked. The girl laughed at the idea, but she caught up her skirts, and they wandered on in the shade of the tall elms. Marley did not know where they were. The yard seemed an endless garden, immense, unknown, enchanted; the dark trees all around him stood like the forest of some park, and the lawn stretched away to fall over endless terraces; he imagined statues and fountains gleaming in the heavy shadows of the trees. The house seemed lost in the distance, though he felt its presence there behind him.