“I was going right up, anyway,” Sally said with an apologetic air and a glance toward the door.

“I’ll go, too!” Martie jumbled the cards together, and rose.  “It’s nearly ten, anyway.”

A moment later she and Sally went out of the room together.  But while Sally went straight upstairs, to light the bedroom gas, fold up the counterpane, and otherwise play the part of the good sister she was, Martie noiselessly opened the side door and stepped out for a breath of the sweet autumn night.

There was a spectacularly bright moon, somewhere; Martie could not see it, but beyond the sunken garden she caught glimpses of silvery brightness on the roofs of Monroe.  Even here, under the dark trees, pools of light had formed and the heavy foliage was shot with shafts of radiance.  A strong wind was clicking the eucalyptus leaves together, and carrying bits of rubbish here and there about the yard.  Martie could hear voices, the barking of dogs, and the whine of the ten o’clock trolley, down in the village.

The gate slammed.  Leonard came in.

“Pa tell you to watch for me?” he asked fearfully.

“No.”  Martie, sitting on the top step and hugging her knees, answered indifferently.  “It’s not ten yet.  What you been doing?”

“Oh, nothing!” Len passed her and went in.

As a matter of fact, he had called for his chum, sauntered into the candy store for caramels, joined the appreciative group that watched a drunken man forcibly ejected from Casserley’s saloon, visited the pool room and witnessed a game or two, gone back into the street to tease two hurrying and giggling girls with his young wit, and drifted into a passing juggler’s wretched and vulgar show.  This, or something like this, was what Len craved when he begged to “go out for a while” after dinner.  It was sometimes a little more entertaining, sometimes less so; but it spelled life for the seventeen-year-old boy.

He could not have described this to Martie, even had he cared to do so.  She would not have understood it.  But she felt a vague yearning, too, for lights and companionship and freedom, a vague envy of Leonard.

The world was out there, beyond the gate, beyond the village.  She was in it, but not of it.  She longed to begin to live, and knew not how.  Ten years before she had been only a busy, independent, happy little girl; turning to her mother and sister for advice, obeying her father without question.  But Pa and Lydia, and Len with his egotism, and Ma with her trials, were nothing to Martie now.  In battle, in pestilence, or after a great fire, she would have risen head and shoulders above them all, would have worked gloriously to reestablish them.  She supposed that she loved them dearly.  But so terrible was the hunger of her heart for her share of life—­for loving, serving, planning, and triumphing—­that she would have swept them all aside like cobwebs to grasp the first reality flung her by fate.