She turned and watched the
long hand--how long a minute was! Three hours more! She shivered
and went inside and got her bonnet--she could not be alone when
the hour came, and she started down the road toward Uncle Billy's
mill. Hale! Hale! Hale!--the name began to ring in her ears like a
bell. The little shacks he had built up the creek were deserted
and gone to ruin, and she began to wonder in the light of what her
father had said how much of a tragedy that meant to him. Here was
the spot where he was fishing that day, when she had slipped down
behind him and he had turned and seen her for the first time. She
could recall his smile and the very tone of his kind voice:
"Howdye, little girl!" And the cat had got her tongue. She
remembered when she had written her name, after she had first
kissed him at the foot of the beech--"June HAIL," and by a
grotesque mental leap the beating of his name in her brain now
made her think of the beating of hailstones on her father's roof
one night when as a child she had lain and listened to them. Then
she noticed that the autumn shadows seemed to make the river
darker than the shadows of spring--or was it already the stain of
dead leaves? Hale could have told her.
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