t I ever did answer Peter anything, but
he never noticed that when he thought of how my loving him would help
out with the play.

Just here I was musing so deeply on the intricacies of love that I
nearly ran over a nice, motherly old cow that had come to the middle of
the road with perfectly good faith in me when she saw me coming. And as
I rounded her off well to the left again my thoughts skidded back to Sam
and the way he had treated me as less than a heifer calf after _I_ had
not seen him for a year, and _she_ had just seen him that morning at
feeding-time.

"Head off that saucy young cow, indeed!" I sniffed, as I ran the car
into the side yard between my home and the old Crittenden house.

"I wonder if he really expected me to be waiting there in that lane for
him?" I questioned myself. And the answer I got from the six-year-old
girl that is buried alive in me was that Sam did expect me to do as he
told me, and that something serious might happen if I didn't. As I
turned Redwheels over to old Eph, who adores it because it is the only
one he ever had his hands on, I felt a queer sinking somewhere in the
heart of that same young self. I always had helped Sam--and suppose that
unspeakable animal had got lost to him for ever just because I hadn't
done as he told me! I reached out my hand for the runabout to start
right back; then I realized it was too late. The night had erected a
lovely spangled purple tent of twilight over Hayesboro, and the
all-evening performances were about to begin.

Lovely women were lighting lamps and drawing shades or meeting the
masculine population at front gates with babies in their arms or
beau-catcher curls set on their cheeks with deadly intent. Negro cooks
were hustling suppers on their smoking stoves, and one of the doves that
lives up in the vines under the eaves of my home moaned out and was
answered by one from under the vines that grow over the gables at the
Crittendens'. I haven't felt as lonesome as all that since the first
week of Sam's freshman year at college. As I looked across the lilac
hedge, which was just beginning to show a green sap tint along its gray
branches, I seemed to see my poor little blue-ginghamed, pigtailed self
crouched at Judge Crittenden's feet on the front steps, sobbing my
lonely heart away while he smoked his sorrow down with a long brier
pipe, and the Byrd chirped his little three-year-old protest in concert
with us both. Most eighteen-year-old men