“What will you do up there?” she whispered.

Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the darkness.  He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend.  A feeling of impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned, and he tried to tell her of it.  “Everyone talks and talks,” he began.  “I’m sick of it.  I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don’t count.  Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop.  I don’t know.  I guess I don’t care much.  I just want to work and keep quiet.  That’s all I’ve got in my mind.”

Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand.  He did not want to bring the meeting to an end but could not think of anything more to say.  “It’s the last time we’ll see each other,” he whispered.

A wave of sentiment swept over Helen.  Putting her hand upon Seth’s shoulder, she started to draw his face down toward her own upturned face.  The act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some vague adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would now never be realized.  “I think I’d better be going along,” she said, letting her hand fall heavily to her side.  A thought came to her.  “Don’t you go with me; I want to be alone,” she said.  “You go and talk with your mother.  You’d better do that now.”

Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl turned and ran away through the hedge.  A desire to run after her came to him, but he only stood staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been perplexed and puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she had come.  Walking slowly toward the house, he stopped in the shadow of a large tree and looked at his mother sitting by a lighted window busily sewing.  The feeling of loneliness that had visited him earlier in the evening returned and colored his thoughts of the adventure through which he had just passed.  “Huh!” he exclaimed, turning and staring in the direction taken by Helen White.  “That’s how things’ll turn out.  She’ll be like the rest.  I suppose she’ll begin now to look at me in a funny way.”  He looked at the ground and pondered this thought.  “She’ll be embarrassed and feel strange when I’m around,” he whispered to himself.  “That’s how it’ll be.  That’s how everything’ll turn out.  When it comes to loving someone, it won’t never be me.  It’ll be someone else—­some fool—­someone who talks a lot—­someone like that George Willard.”

TANDY

Until she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off Trunion Pike.  Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead.  The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion.  He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother’s relatives.