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 books at school and one had been given him by a child met in the street, while several had been delivered through the village post office.

The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and had reflected a mind inflamed by novel reading.  Seth had not answered them, although he had been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in pencil upon the stationery of the banker’s wife.  Putting them into the pocket of his coat, he went through the street or stood by the fence in the school yard with something burning at his side.  He thought it fine that he should be thus selected as the favorite of the richest and most attractive girl in town.

Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark building faced the street.  The building had once been a factory for the making of barrel staves but was now vacant.  Across the street upon the porch of a house a man and woman talked of their childhood, their voices coming dearly across to the half-embarrassed youth and maiden.  There was the sound of scraping chairs and the man and woman came down the gravel path to a wooden gate.  Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over and kissed the woman.  “For old times’ sake,” he said and, turning, walked rapidly away along the sidewalk.

“That’s Belle Turner,” whispered Helen, and put her hand boldly into Seth’s hand.  “I didn’t know she had a fellow.  I thought she was too old for that.”  Seth laughed uneasily.  The hand of the girl was warm and a strange, dizzy feeling crept over him.  Into his mind came a desire to tell her something he had been determined not to tell.  “George Willard’s in love with you,” he said, and in spite of his agitation his voice was low and quiet.  “He’s writing a story, and he wants to be in love.  He wants to know how it feels.  He wanted me to tell you and see what you said.”

Again Helen and Seth walked in silence.  They came to the garden surrounding the old Richmond place and going through a gap in the hedge sat on a wooden bench beneath a bush.