unsets to
things of glorious rose and red and gold though there wasn't a single
cloud or streamer in the sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon
lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely
as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed
until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that
accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as
if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ago, unused now,
unimportant, forgotten.

So unquestionably he was ready enough to go. He had all the fine and
far-flung dreams of surging youth. He peopled the world with his
fancies, built castles on every high hill. He felt the urge of
ambition fiercely stirring within him, latent power pulsing through
him. What would you? Wasn't he young and in love?

For there had been, you must know, a good deal between them. What
does one do in these deadly dull little towns for amusement, when
one is young and fain and restless? Harber tells me they walked the
streets and shaded lanes in the dim green coolness of evening,
lounged in the orchard hammock, drifted down the little river, past
still pools, reed-bordered, under vaulting sycamores, over hurrying
reaches fretted with pebbles, forgot everything except one another
and their fancies and made, as youth must, love. That was the
programme complete, except for the talk, the fascinating,
never-ending talk. Volumes on volumes of it--whole libraries of it.

So, under her veiled fostering, the feeling that he must leave
Tawnleytown kept growing upon Harber until one evening it
crystallized in decision.

It was on a Sunday. They had taken a lunch and climbed Bald Knob, a
thousand feet above the town, late in the afternoon. The dying sun
and the trees had given them a splendid symphony in black and gold,
and had silenced them for a little. They sat looking down over the
valley in which the well-known landmarks slowly grew dark and
indistinguishable and dim lights blossomed one after another. The
sound of church bells rose faintly through the still air. The pale
last light faded in the sky.

Harber and Janet sat in the long grass, their hearts stirring with
the same urgent, inarticulate thoughts, their hands clasped together.

"Let's wait for Eighty-seven," she said.

Harber pressed her hand for reply.

In the mind of each of them Eighty-seven was the symbol of release
from Tawnleytown, of freedom, of romance.