a ritual so antiquated and a gift so obsolete,
could do naught but depart. Miss Susie had somehow managed to keep the
advantage, and the two white women watched the departing figure
shuffle down the walk, out through the sagging, screaky gate. The
clouds had broken in the west and a soft golden radiance suffused the
row of maples that lined the fence along the street, and the swelling
branches gleamed with promise. Over toward the east a patch of blue
sky appeared, and then the tip of a sickle moon thrust itself through
and floated entire for a moment on a tiny azure lake. A little breeze
came round the corner of the porch from the sunset. It was as soft and
warm as an unspoken promise, and it flipped back skirt hems and
twisted hair tendrils most inoffensively.

"Come, honey!" Miss Susie said at length, wrenching herself loose from
the charm. "It's getting late."

Mary Louise stepped slowly off the porch on to the spongy lawn that
stretched out to a summerhouse partly covered with the skeleton of
last summer's vines. "Just a minute, Aunt Susie," she answered,
without looking back. "I want to see how the hydrangea is coming on."

Miss Susie turned and closed the door behind her.

Bloomfield had a quality of unchangeableness. Even in the dead of
winter you could tell with half an eye how it would look bedecked in
its summer finery. Down the stretch of years, past many an intervening
milepost, it always stood clearly envisioned to its sons and daughters
both natural and adopted. There was about four hundred yards of
macadam street lined with oaks and maples as old as or older than the
meeting house of early Post-Revolutionary days which stood at the
cross-roads corner diagonally across from the glary white gasolene
station. Half-way down the street, in a cluster of elms, stood the
remnants of an ancient tavern, whose front wall, flush with the
sidewalk, showed occasional bullet scars on the rough red brownstone
surface. Green outside shutters lay inertly back from dull leaded
panes which reflected metallically the orange glow of the setting sun,
and over the door, which was squat and low and level with the
pavement, an ancient four-sided lantern, hung from a bracket of rusty
black iron, was gathering cobwebs in disuse. All this lay within Mary
Louise's field of vision from the summerhouse and yet she saw it not.
She was staring abstractedly at a wary robin that had stopped to rest
on a fence post, his beak all frowzy