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-bell farther away, then it ceased.  The wind was quite crisp and cool, and it smote his back from the northwest.  He could smell wild-grapes and the pungent odor of decaying leaves.  The autumn was beginning, and over his thoughts, raised like a ghost from the ashes of the summer, stole a vague vision of the winter.  He saw for a second the driving slant of the snow-storm over the old drifting road, he saw the white slant of Sylvia’s house-roof through it.  And at the same time a curious, pleasant desire, which might be primitive and coeval with the provident passion of the squirrels and honey-bees, thrilled him.  Then he dismissed it bitterly.  What need of winter-stores and provisions for sweet home-comfort in the hearts of freezing storms was there for him?  What did he care whether or not he laid in stores of hearth-wood, of garden produce, of apples, just for himself in his miserable solitude?  The inborn desire of Northern races at the approach of the sterile winters, containing, as do all desires to insure their fulfilment, the elements of human pleasure, failed suddenly to move him when he remembered that his human life, in one sense, was over.

[Illustration:  “He remained there motionless”]

Opposite him across the road, in an old orchard, was a tree full of apples.  The low sun struck them, and they showed spheres of rosy orange, as brilliant as Atalanta’s apples of gold, against the background of dark violet clouds.  Barney looked at this tree, which was glorified for the time almost out of its common meaning as a tree, as he might have looked at a gorgeous procession passing before him, while his mind was engrossed with his own misery, seeming to project before his eyes like a veil.