t belong. I'll not
make a fuss about it, but I'm going to get out of
here."

Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness,
feeling himself an outcast in his own town. He began to
pity himself, but a sense of the absurdity of his
thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he
was simply old beyond his years and not at all a
subject for self-pity. "I'm made to go to work. I may
be able to make a place for myself by steady working,
and I might as well be at it," he decided.

Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the
darkness by the front door. On the door hung a heavy
brass knocker, an innovation introduced into the
village by Helen White's mother, who had also organized
a women's club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the
knocker and let it fall. Its heavy clatter sounded like
a report from distant guns. "How awkward and foolish I
am," he thought. "If Mrs. White comes to the door, I
won't know what to say."

It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth
standing at the edge of the porch. Blushing with
pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the door softly.
"I'm going to get out of town. I don't know what I'll
do, but I'm going to get out of here and go to work. I
think I'll go to Columbus," he said. "Perhaps I'll get
into the State University down there. Anyway, I'm
going. I'll tell mother tonight." He hesitated and
looked doubtfully about. "Perhaps you wouldn't mind
coming to walk with me?"

Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the
trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the face of the
moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man
with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying
forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and,
putting the ladder against the wooden lamp-post,
lighted the village lights so that their way was half
lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the
deepening shadows cast by the low-branched trees. In
the tops of the trees the wind began to play,
disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about
calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of
the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the
gathering swarm of night flies.

Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had
been a half expressed intimacy between him and the
maiden who now for the first time walked beside him.
For a time she had been beset with a madness for
writing notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found
them concealed in his