IX

One Sunday evening, about four months after the cherry party,
Barnabas Thayer came out of his house and strolled slowly across the
road. Then he paused, and leaned up against some pasture bars and
looked around him. There was nobody in sight on the road in either
direction, and everything was very still, except for the vibrating
calls of the hidden insects that come to their flood-tide of life in
early autumn.

Barnabas listened to those calls, which had in them a certain element
of mystery, as have all things which reach only one sense. They were
in their humble way the voices of the unseen, and as he listened they
seemed to take on a rhythmic cadence. Presently the drone of
multifold vibrations sounded in his ears with even rise and fall,
like the mighty breathing of Nature herself. The sun was low, and the
sky was full of violet clouds. Barney could see outlined faintly
against them the gray sweep of the roof that covered Charlotte's
daily life.

Soon the bell for the evening meeting began to ring, and Barney
started. People might soon appear on their way to meeting, and he
did not want to see them. Barney avoided everybody now; he had been
nowhere since the cherry party, not even to meeting. He led the life
of a hermit, and seldom met his kind at all, except at the store,
where he went to buy the simple materials for his solitary meals.

Barney turned aside from the main road into the old untravelled one
leading past Sylvia Crane's house. It appeared scarcely more than a
lane; the old wheel-ruts were hidden between green weedy ridges, the
bordering stone-walls looked like long green barrows, being overgrown
with poison-ivy vines and rank shrubs. For a long way there was no
house except Sylvia Crane's. There was one cellar where a house had
stood before Barney could remember. There were a few old blackened
chimney-bricks still there, the step-stone worn by dead and forgotten
feet, and the old lilac-bushes that had grown against the front
windows. Two poplar-trees, too, stood where the front yard had met
the road, casting long shadows like men. Sylvia Crane's house was
just beyond, and Barney passed it with a furtive anxious glance,
because Charlotte's aunt lived there. He saw nobody at the windows,
but the guardian-stone was quite rolled away from the door, so Sylvia
was at home.

Barney walked a little way beyond; then he sat down on the
stone-wall, and remained there, motionless. He heard the meeting-b