would understand that.  At the table next day while Albert Hardy talked and the two girls whispered and laughed, she did not look at John but at the table and as soon as possible escaped.  In the evening she went out of the house until she was sure he had taken the wood to her room and gone away.  When after several evenings of intense listening she heard no call from the darkness in the orchard, she was half beside herself with grief and decided that for her there was no way to break through the wall that had shut her off from the joy of life.

And then on a Monday evening two or three weeks after the writing of the note, John Hardy came for her.  Louise had so entirely given up the thought of his coming that for a long time she did not hear the call that came up from the orchard.  On the Friday evening before, as she was being driven back to the farm for the week-end by one of the hired men, she had on an impulse done a thing that had startled her, and as John Hardy stood in the darkness below and called her name softly and insistently, she walked about in her room and wondered what new impulse had led her to commit so ridiculous an act.

The farm hand, a young fellow with black curly hair, had come for her somewhat late on that Friday evening and they drove home in the darkness.  Louise, whose mind was filled with thoughts of John Hardy, tried to make talk but the country boy was embarrassed and would say nothing.  Her mind began to review the loneliness of her childhood and she remembered with a pang the sharp new loneliness that had just come to her.  “I hate everyone,” she cried suddenly, and then broke forth into a tirade that frightened her escort.  “I hate father and the old man Hardy, too,” she declared vehemently.  “I get my lessons there in the school in town but I hate that also.”

Louise frightened the farm hand still more by turning and putting her cheek down upon his shoulder.  Vaguely she hoped that he like that young man who had stood in the darkness with Mary would put his arms about her and kiss her, but the country boy was only alarmed.  He struck the horse with the whip and began to whistle.  “The road is rough, eh?” he said loudly.  Louise was so angry that reaching up she snatched his hat from his head and threw it into the road.  When he jumped out of the buggy and went to get it, she drove off and left him to walk the rest of the way back to the farm.

Louise Bentley took John Hardy to be her lover.  That was not what she wanted but it was so the young man had interpreted her approach to him, and so anxious was she to achieve something else that she made no resistance.  When after a few months they were both afraid that she was about to become a mother, they went one evening to the county seat and were married.  For a few months they lived in the Hardy house and then took a house of their own.  All during the first year Louise tried to make her husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied.  Again and again she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always without success.  Filled with his own notions of love between men and women, he did not listen but began to kiss her upon the lips.  That confused her so that in the end she did not want to be kissed.  She did not know what she wanted.