Once he told May about his weekly visits to Miss Sprague. He described the house and the neighborhood, the way the Germans had stared at him in the hall, the very details of Miss Sprague’s room and the life lived there, and, tentatively, how he had felt when he sat there and read the newspaper to her.

  ‘That was certainly nice of you, Perse,’ May said, patting his arm in approbation, ‘reading to her and all. I’m sure she appreciated it.’

  ‘She didn’t appreciate it a damned bit,’ he asserted.

  ‘Why, that’s terrible, Perse. She should have, and you doing all that for her.’

  ‘I didn’t do it for her,’ he said shortly. ‘I reckon I did it for myself.’ That was it, for a fact, he thought; he had done it for himself. He saw that clearly now, so many years later.

  ‘For yourself?’ May asked, her tone puzzled.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘for myself.’

  She did not say anything else.

  During the weeks when the summer slanted off into fall, he thought rather often about Miss Sprague. She had, for a time, while he built up his law practice and wrapped up his life in May, dwindled into a rarely remembered episode of his past. But now that May was gone and he was alone in the house, and in fact so often stayed away from town for days at a time, the recollection of Miss Sprague, and speculations about her, began to occupy a place similar to the place which she had occupied during those years in Philadelphia. The fact, he decided, was not strange, for in those occupationless days and nights, the items of the past which, in the forward drive of his hopes and activities, had seemed to be flashing from him into distance, like objects seen from a moving train, now appeared with an importance and simultaneity that surprised him. And he scanned those items for some explanation, some hint of interpretation, for the present. Then, baffled, he would try to thrust them from his mind completely.

  He did not know whether Miss Sprague was alive or dead. Since his mother’s death, he had had but one letter from Miss Sprague. He had written to her to tell her of the death of his mother. After some weeks he had received a letter from her saying that she was very sorry that Mrs. Munn was dead and sympathized with him in his bereavement. The letter was curt and detached, almost anonymous.

  Now, a good many years after the event, he had the impulse to write to Miss Sprague. But he decided against it, for, even as the impulse came, there came the conviction that the letter would not be answered. To answer his letter would be a concession, a weakness, for her. Now she would be, whether alive or dead, beyond such concessions; that letter to him on the occasion of his mother’s death had, he was sure, been the grudging last.

  Alone much of the time now, standing in the yard or walking across the fields, or sitting on the porch in the evening aware of the new edge to the air, or staring up at the dark above his bed, he occasionally wondered about the nature of Miss Sprague’s loneliness. He tried to feel himself back across time and across the bounds of personality into her special loneliness. He recalled how, during those periods of loneliness and homesickness in Philadelphia — and he had been lonely during all those years — he had wondered how anybody could be so alone, so cut off, so withdrawn, as Miss Sprague, and still live.

  He himself was much alone now, and by choice. Even though he knew that work waited for him at his office, that obligations were, one after another, slipping past the promised date of fulfillment, he could not bring himself to go to town, to meet the men whom he had seen commonly and pleasantly, to say the things which he had so often said before, to sit at the desk where he had sat. He only went in when the pressure of business was so great that it could not be ignored, or when the girl who worked for him telephoned to remind him of an appointment of special importance.

  The strange thing — and the strangeness of it grew upon him day after day — was that he was almost glad for May’s absence. He had been almost glad that morning after the death of Trevelyan, when he woke up, in the full light of day, to find the house empty except for the negro cook, who silently set the food before him and watched him with a furtive and insolent curiosity. He had waked on the couch in the living-room and had stared at the ceiling while the feelings of unease, loss, and isolation that filled him, achieved in memory, as a saturated solution settles out its characteristic crystals, the precise structure of fact and chronology.

  He was stiff and cramped from lying on the couch, and his mouth dry as though from drinking. He rose slowly from the couch and walked, with an almost experimental motion, across the carpet to the front windows. There, he flung back the curtains and let the full brilliance of the sunlight strike into the room. That light, falling across the window-sill and spreading over the carpet at his feet to illuminate the marks worn by long and familiar use, seemed almost to deny his recollections. The carpet was prevailingly blue, a dull blue, with a large design of flowers, blue too. But it was so worn and faded that for large tracts the design was lost. At his feet Mr. Munn could see the coarse, brownish cords of the foundation fabric, for the nap at that spot had been trodden almost entirely away. Morning and evening, people had stood here to adjust the curtains, or alone in the room, to stare for a moment out across the yard and beyond the maple trees to the pasture. Fleetingly, Mr. Munn thought of those people, his mother, his father, relatives, servants whose names and faces he had forgotten, people dead before he was born; and thought, I am not like any of them. He turned abruptly from the window. He saw, on the marble-topped table, the lamp. The bowl was dry, the wick charred down, and the chimney streaked with smoke. He had fallen asleep without blowing it out; it had burned out during the night or, perhaps, even after dawn.

  May, he learned, had left very early. She had sent the cook down to tell Old Mac to hitch up the buggy and bring it round. Then she had gone away in the buggy, with the old negro man driving. About ten-thirty Mr. Munn, walking in the front yard, had seen the buggy slowly approaching up the drive. He had waited at the gate, but the old negro man, hunched forward over the reins and apparently not seeing him, had gone on past. Mr. Munn had walked back to the stable. Upon his approach, the negro seemed to be entirely engaged in fumbling with a stubborn piece of harness.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Mr. Munn had demanded.

  The negro had kept on fumbling with the harness strap.

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Munn had insisted, ‘answer me.’

  ‘I’se gonna answer you, Misser Perse,’ the old man had said, ‘soon ez I kin git shet of this-here. Hit looks lak my jints is gitten so bad I caint do nuthen. Now looks lak you’d say hot weather better’n cold weather. But naw. Here ’tis, hot weather ——’

  ‘Where did you go?’ Mr. Munn had asked.

  Without raising his eyes from the harness strap, the negro man had answered, ‘Over to her folks’ place.’

  ‘Her aunt’s place, Miss Burnham’s?’

  The negro man had nodded, still fumbling with the strap. Mr. Munn had turned on his heel and gone back to the house.

  Two days later, the man from the Burnham place had come, driving Miss Burnham’s surrey, to ask for May’s clothes and things. Mr. Munn had been there at the time. He had stood in the middle of the floor of the big room upstairs while the cook put May’s things into suitcases and boxes. He had thought that that was the time for him to go down and get on his mare and ride over to the Burnham place and talk to May. He had felt sure, standing there in the middle of the floor and watching the pieces of clothes being dropped limply into the boxes, that if he went over there and talked to her she would come back. He had not thought of what words he could say, or of what thoughts and feelings, even, would seek expression in words. Merely, it had occurred to him, if I go talk to her . . . But he had not gone. He had stood in the middle of the floor, as though rooted to the spot, and then the negro man, with a humble and apologetic stoop, had begun to carry the boxes and bags down.

  Mr. Munn had stood at the window of the bedroom and watched the negro drive off, with the surrey piled high with May’s suitcases and boxes. Then he had looked about the room, moving here and there as though hunting for a mislaid object. By evening, however, he felt more composed. His composure had been mysterious to him, as on the night of Trevelyan’s death. It had been, to his mind, a composure weighty and profound, but dangerous, like a great boulder balanced on the lip of a ravine, but balanced so precariously that, in the end, a breath of wind or the ignorant scurrying of some small ground creature may send it crashing.

  One night, as he walked in the yard under the maples, three or four negroes passed the yard on the way back to visit one of the cabins. They were laughing and talking as they passed, and he leaned on the top board of the fence and listened to them until they were out of hearing. Then, a little later, he heard singing. They had, apparently, gone to Old Mac’s cabin, and were singing there. He could not make out the words. Suddenly, he visualized them all, sitting in Old Mac’s cabin, where a little fire would be smouldering, although the night was warm enough for the door to be open, sitting there around a smoky lamp, or standing loose-jointedly in the shadows, and singing together, with their heads thrown back and their eyes half-closed.

  ‘God damn! God damn! God damn!’ he repeated, aloud and measuredly in the darkness, and his hands gripped the dry, alien boards of the fence. The whitewash powdered, furrily, against the flesh of his hands. He swung on his heel and strode away across the yard.

  During that period he avoided his accustomed activities around the place. Once or twice, as he went incautiously about some ordinary occupation, the currying of his mare or the inspection of the wood that had been cut for the tobacco-firing, some motion of his own or the sight of some familiar object shook, insidiously and suddenly, his massive composure. Warned, like some convalescent sufferer by the flare-up of an old symptom, he withheld himself, husbanded himself, that nothing should strike him suddenly beyond his strength. So he sank when possible into a blank absorption with the fact of the moment, a leaf on the ground at his feet, a white, unmoving spot of cloud on the blue fall sky, the faded pattern on a dish, the hum of the flame of a lamp. As he felt the need to protect himself from the disturbing contact of other persons, so more and more he felt the need to protect himself by denying memory, as it were, from the contact of the self he had been. And his mind closed like a valve against all thoughts of the future.

  Late one afternoon, however, he took down his shotgun and walked across the barn lot and down across the fields back of the house toward the fringe of woods along the creek that watered the farm. When he had reached the brush along the creek and had slipped from sight, he felt relieved and safe. He pushed through the brush, the reddening sumac and buckberry and brittle elder, and entered the open space under the tall shagbark hickories. Their trunks were straight as columns, and unbranching for a long way up. The light filtered goldenly through their unstirring leaves. Yellowish leaves fallen from the hickory boughs lay on the level ground. He paused for a moment and looked high overhead and all around him at the walls of leaves that cut him off so privately from the entire world. Then, slowly, he moved across the open space, toward the creek.

  The ground broke sharply downward toward the creek bank. Here a few sycamores grew, with enormous, white boles from which the umber bark crisped back, and beyond them, willows. The water of the creek had shrunk to leave a gravelly strip shelving off below the level where the willow roots clove to the earth of the bank. Mr. Munn, clutching the willows for support, let himself down off the bank to the little strip of beach. With his gun in readiness, he began to move down the creek. There would be a wider place farther down, he remembered; there the visible stretch of sky would be wider, and the water would spread out, without current apparently and as smooth as a pond, reflecting the sky and the overhanging trees. In a little while now, the doves would begin coming over, toward the water. They would head for that place, as they always, year after year, had done. They would come over, their sharp, nervous wings beating and their too-small heads outthrust. Their swift forms would look black against the paling, peach-colored sky. They would utter their sweet, breathless, complaining cries.

  He reached the wider space and stood in an embrasure of the willows. He fixed his eyes on the sky, waiting. A little way upstream the water made a soft, riffling murmur as it slid over stones into the stillness of the wider basin. That was the only sound he could distinguish.

  The first dove came over, high, from the west, and dipped and swung back. It sank, flutteringly, at the edge of the water, downstream. He had had two chances for a shot, when it first swung back and then when it started to flutter down. The gun had been raised, and his finger on the trigger, but he had not fired. Now he watched the bird that, too far away for a good shot, was prinking at the edge of the water. Then the bird rose, and flew off downstream. He was a little ashamed and irritated that he had passed up the shot, but, unreasoningly, he had not been able to bring himself to press the trigger.

  When the next dove came over, he shot it. It came over the trees straight and rather low, and so swiftly that he had opportunity for scarcely more than a snap shot. Even as the explosion first rang in his ears, he saw the dove veer sharply, as though it had struck an invisible wire, and saw three bits of feather floating from the spot where the dove had been, and saw the dove skid sideways in the air, and then, with two or three wild wing-beats, plunge straight down. With the old exaltation big within him, he glanced quickly upward to see if another dove was coming over, and then ran toward the spot where it had fallen.

  It was stone dead. It lay on the gravel, one wing in the clear water and a small bead of blood on its head and another at the neck. The beak was slightly parted, as when a bird lifts its head after taking a sup of water. Mr. Munn, bending to pick it up, was suddenly seized with revulsion. He straightened up, almost retching. He averted his eyes from the dead bird, and leaning on his gun, as from weakness, stared at the sky.

  How empty and deep and steadily clear it was! he thought, and gazed upward. He left the bird where it lay, one wing in the water. Some animal, he thought, would find and devour it. He clambered up the bank, which was steeper here, and moved hurriedly across the strip of woods toward the fields. The sheltered, cut-off chamber of the woods was now, if anything, oppressive and inimical to him. He pushed his way through the fringe of brush and undergrowth, and found himself, with relief, on the edge of the open fields. He began to walk rapidly up the gradual rise toward the house, which was concealed in its grove. ‘Something’s the matter with me,’ he said, hurrying. Then: ‘Something’s the matter, I’ve got to stop this.’

  Two days later he went to the Burnham place to see May.

  Miss Lucy Burnham, one of the two children of General Sam Burnham, devoted herself to him as long as he lived, and then, after his death, to his memory. Her mother died shortly after the return of the General after the war, leaving the two daughters, according to her last injunction, to look after their father. At the funeral he stood between the two girls, with a hand on the shoulder of each, and the tears streamed from his blue eyes and down into his thick, golden mustaches. The older of the two girls, Lucy, remained his prop and slave, as her mother had been.

  Sam Burnham, commissioned a brigadier late in the war, was a vain, windy, amiable, aimless, and handsome man. He had entered the war as a politically appointed major, ignorant of even the first principles of his new occupation, but very large and military-looking in his uniform. Though he never distinguished himself, he was not a coward and not entirely a fool, and his good humor gave him with his brother officers a certain not quite contemptuous popularity which made his promotions possible. Late in the war there were few enough men who could even dress a company, and so, after Atlanta, he became a brigadier. But after the war he was lost. He had never made decisions for himself; his father, his wife, his superior officers or some able adjutant had always managed his life. Now, his father was senile and bankrupt, the war was over, and his wife was dead.

  After the life of the state began to settle into order, and he began to recover from his personal confusion, he drifted into politics. Before the war he had had some political experience, and now it seemed the only occupation in which his love of talk, his amiability, his large-molded good looks, and his military record would receive their proper reward. He was, within limits, successful. But he became steadily poorer, and steadily more contemptible in the eyes of his colleagues. There was money to be made in politics, even in obscure offices, but he was honest. While other men demanded money, or information by which money could be made, he demanded only flattery. His vote or influence could be had for that, and men knew it.

  Once his wife, willingly and capably, had managed his affairs. Then his daughter Lucy assumed the obligation. She was a poor manager, stubborn and pliable by turns, suspicious and trustful. In his many absences she tried to hold the farm together, but when he was at home she devoted all her energies to pleasing him. After her sister, Ruth, whom she considered a mere child, had eloped with an unknown and penniless young man from Arkansas, she increased the rigor of her devotions to her father. And when, shortly after her sister’s marriage, General Burnham was defeated for re-election and began to fail in health, her abnegation became almost complete. She rarely left his side. She read to him much, novels for the most part, but tried to keep the newspapers away from him for fear that they would upset him. She would bring flowers to him from the unworked garden by the house, and say, in the coaxing voice of one speaking to a child, ‘See, papa, see, aren’t they pretty this year?’ Or she would comb and brush his luxuriant long hair, and stroke his fair, almost unseamed forehead, and pat his still-yellow mustaches. Then, sometimes, he would take her hands and, while she knelt beside him, hold them gently, and say in his vibrant, melancholy voice: ‘I’ve seen a great deal of the world, my chick. I’m an old man, and I’ve seen a great deal, pomp and circumstance and wealth and honor and valorous deeds, but — and what I say I know to be true — a kind and loving heart is the greatest thing in the world. And you have a loving heart, my Lucy.’ At such a moment, so great was her joy, she felt repaid for everything.