angled, and
withering, and in it dead leaves lay everywhere, stems up, stems down,
in reckless confusion. The scarlet sage-pods were brown and seeds were
dropping from their tiny gaping mouths. The marigolds were frost-nipped
and one lonely black-winged butterfly was vainly searching them one
by one for the lost sweets of summer. The gorgeous crowns of the
sun-flowers were nothing but grotesque black mummy-heads set on lean,
dead bodies, and the clump of big castor-plants, buffeted by the wind,
leaned this way and that like giants in a drunken orgy trying to keep
one another from falling down. The blight that was on the garden was the
blight that was in her heart, and two bits of cheer only she found--one
yellow nasturtium, scarlet-flecked, whose fragrance was a memory of the
spring that was long gone, and one little cedar tree that had caught
some dead leaves in its green arms and was firmly holding them as though
to promise that another spring would surely come. With the flower in
her hand, she started up the ravine to her dreaming place, but it was so
lonely up there and she turned back. She went into her room and tried
to read. Mechanically, she half opened the lid of the piano and shut
it, horrified by her own act. As she passed out on the porch again she
noticed that it was only nine o'clock. She turned and watched the long
hand--how long a minute was! Three hours more! She shivered and went
inside and got her bonnet--she could not be alone when the hour came,
and she started down the road toward Uncle Billy's mill. Hale! Hale!
Hale!--the name began to ring in her ears like a bell. The little shacks
he had built up the creek were deserted and gone to ruin, and she began
to wonder in the light of what her father had said how much of a tragedy
that meant to him. Here was the spot where he was fishing that day, when
she had slipped down behind him and he had turned and seen her for the
first time. She could recall his smile and the very tone of his kind
voice:

"Howdye, little girl!" And the cat had got her tongue. She remembered
when she had written her name, after she had first kissed him at the
foot of the beech--"June HAIL," and by a grotesque mental leap the
beating of his name in her brain now made her think of the beating of
hailstones on her father's roof one night when as a child she had lain
and listened to them. Then she noticed that the autumn shadows seemed to
make the river darker than the shadows of sp