be able to
hear the tinkle of a bicycle-bell a long way down the road....

She was always glad when she got to the little house before Harney. She
liked to have time to take in every detail of its secret sweetness--the
shadows of the apple-trees swaying on the grass, the old walnuts
rounding their domes below the road, the meadows sloping westward in the
afternoon light--before his first kiss blotted it all out. Everything
unrelated to the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as the
remembrance of a dream. The only reality was the wondrous unfolding
of her new self, the reaching out to the light of all her contracted
tendrils. She had lived all her life among people whose sensibilities
seemed to have withered for lack of use; and more wonderful, at first,
than Harney's endearments were the words that were a part of them. She
had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he
made it as bright and open as the summer air.

On the morrow of the day when she had shown him the way to the deserted
house he had packed up and left Creston River for Boston; but at the
first station he had jumped on the train with a hand-bag and scrambled
up into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks he had camped in
the house, getting eggs and milk from the solitary farm in the valley,
where no one knew him, and doing his cooking over a spirit-lamp. He got
up every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool he knew of, and
spent long hours lying in the scented hemlock-woods above the house, or
wandering along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the misty blue
valleys that swept away east and west between the endless hills. And in
the afternoon Charity came to him.

With part of what was left of her savings she had hired a bicycle for
a month, and every day after dinner, as soon as her guardian started to
his office, she hurried to the library, got out her bicycle, and flew
down the Creston road. She knew that Mr. Royall, like everyone else in
North Dormer, was perfectly aware of her acquisition: possibly he, as
well as the rest of the village, knew what use she made of it. She did
not care: she felt him to be so powerless that if he had questioned her
she would probably have told him the truth. But they had never spoken to
each other since the night on the wharf at Nettleton. He had returned to
North Dormer only on the third day after that encounter, arriving just
as Charity and Verena were sittin