Claude turned his car and went back along the dim, twilight road with Enid.  “I usually like to see Gladys, but when I found her with you this afternoon, I was terribly disappointed for a minute.  I’d just been talking with your father, and I wanted to come straight to you.  Do you think you could marry me, Enid?”

“I don’t believe it would be for the best, Claude.”  She spoke sadly.

He took her passive hand.  “Why not?”

“My mind is full of other plans.  Marriage is for most girls, but not for all.”

Enid had taken off her hat.  In the low evening light Claude studied her pale face under her brown hair.  There was something graceful and charming about the way she held her head, something that suggested both submissiveness and great firmness.  “I’ve had those far-away dreams, too, Enid; but now my thoughts don’t get any further than you.  If you could care ever so little for me to start on, I’d be willing to risk the rest.”  She sighed.  “You know I care for you.  I’ve never made any secret of it.  But we’re happy as we are, aren’t we?”

“No, I’m not.  I’ve got to have some life of my own, or I’ll go to pieces.  If you won’t have me, I’ll try South America,—­and I won’t come back until I am an old man and you are an old woman.”

Enid looked at him, and they both smiled.

The mill house was black except for a light in one upstairs window.  Claude sprang out of his car and lifted Enid gently to the ground.  She let him kiss her soft cool mouth, and her long lashes.  In the pale, dusty dusk, lit only by a few white stars, and with the chill of the creek already in the air, she seemed to Claude like a shivering little ghost come up from the rushes where the old mill-dam used to be.  A terrible melancholy clutched at the boy’s heart.  He hadn’t thought it would be like this.  He drove home feeling weak and broken.  Was there nothing in the world outside to answer to his own feelings, and was every turn to be fresh disappointment?  Why was life so mysteriously hard?  This country itself was sad, he thought, looking about him,-and you could no more change that than you could change the story in an unhappy human face.  He wished to God he were sick again; the world was too rough a place to get about in.

There was one person in the world who felt sorry for Claude that night.  Gladys Farmer sat at her bedroom window for a long while, watching the stars and thinking about what she had seen plainly enough that afternoon.  She had liked Enid ever since they were little girls,—­and knew all there was to know about her.  Claude would become one of those dead people that moved about the streets of Frankfort; everything that was Claude would perish, and the shell of him would come and go and eat and sleep for fifty years.  Gladys had taught the children of many such dead men.  She had worked out a misty philosophy for herself, full of strong convictions and confused figures.