The wild, cool, shower-dashed, sun-dappled, sweet-scented, growing days of spring followed each other, passing into weeks, months, until midsummer, with its pause in rural life, was come. Octavia Gentry, who was a little out of health, had sent word again and again that she wanted Callista to come home. It was a Sunday morning in the deep calm of July when she finally came over herself to the Cleaverage place to try to fetch her daughter. The thrush's song that waked Callista that morning at sunrise, rang as keenly cool as ever; but the frogs were silenced, and the whirr of the "dry-fly" was heard everywhere instead. Gloss of honey-dew was on the oak and hickory leaves, and the blue air veiling the forest shadows spoke of late summer. The morning was languid with heat; the breakfast smoke had risen straight into [224] the dawn, and the day burnt its way forward without dew or breeze; hills velvet-blue, clouds motionless over the motionless tree-tops, toned with mellow atmospheric tints that were yet not the haze that would follow in autumn. One or two neighbors had strolled in, and about mid-forenoon Ajax Gentry and his daughter-in-law drove up in the buckboard and old Kimbro and Sylvane went out trying to pretend surprise, yet Callista knew all the time that the meeting had been arranged--that her people were expected. "Honey!" Her mother took her into a reproachful embrace, and then held her back and looked at her, tears streaming down her face, "honey--I've come for you. Me and gran'pappy is a-goin' to take you right home with us when we go this evenin'. Git your things a-ready. Me with but one child on this earth, and her a-lookin' forward to what you air, and to stay with--well, of course, not strangers--but with other folks!"