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We stood looking back, in our wonder, until out of the house came the photographer himself, all packed up—a small, hurrying man, black-coated as his subjects were. He wore a pale straw summer hat, which was more than they had. It was to see him off, tell him good-bye, reassure him, that they had waited.

"Open it again! Look out, Dicey," said Kate, "get back."

He did not tarry. With paraphernalia to spare, he ran out between the big bushes ahead of us with a strange, rushing, fuse-like, Yankee sound—out through the evening and into his Ford, and was gone like that.

I felt the secret pang behind him—I know I did feel the cheat he had found and left in the house, the helpless, asking cheat. I felt it more and more, too strongly.

And then we were both excruciated by our terrible desire, and catching each other at the same moment with almost fierce hands, we did it, we laughed. We leaned against each other and on the weak, open gate, and gasped and choked into our handkerchiefs, and finally we cried. "Maybe she kissed him!" cried Kate at random. Each time we tried to stop ourselves, we sought each other's faces and started again. We laughed as though we were inspired.

"She forgot to take the pencil out of her hair!" gasped Kate.

"Oh no! What do you think Uncle Felix wrote with! He managed— it was the pencil out of Sister Anne's head!" That was almost too much for me. I held on to the gate.

I was aware somehow that birds kept singing passionately all around us just the same, and hurling themselves like bolts in front of our streaming eyes.

Kate tried to say something new—to stop us disgracing ourselves and each other, our visit, our impending tragedy, Aunt Ethel, everything. Not that anybody, anything in the world could hear us, reeled back in those bushes now, except ourselves.

"You know Aunt Beck—she never let us leave Mingo without picking us our nosegay on the way down this walk, every little thing she grew that smelled nice, pinks, four-o'clocks, verbena, heliotrope, bits of nicotiana—she grew all such little things, just for that, Di. And she wound their stems, round and round and round, with a black or white thread she would take from a needle in her collar, and set it all inside a rose-geranium leaf, and presented it to you at the gate—right here. That was Aunt Beck," said Kate's positive voice. "She wouldn't let you leave without it."

But it was no good. We had not laughed together that way since we were too little to know any better.

With tears streaming down my cheeks, I said, "I don't remember her."

"But she wouldn't let you forget. She made you remember her!"

Then we stopped

I stood there and folded the note back up. There was the house, floating on the swimming dust of evening, its gathered, safe-shaped mass darkening. A dove in the woods called its five notes—two and three—at first unanswered. The last gleam of sunset, except for the threadbare curtain of wistaria, could be seen going on behind. The cows were lowing. The dust was in windings, the roads in their own shapes in the air, the exhalations of where the people all had come from.

"They'll all be leaving now," said Kate. "It's first-dark, almost."

But the grouping on the porch still held, that last we looked back, posed there along the rail, quiet and obscure and never-known as passengers on a ship already embarked to sea. Their country faces were drawing in even more alike in the dusk, I thought. Their faces were like dark boxes of secrets and desires to me, but locked safely, like old-fashioned caskets for the safe conduct of jewels on a voyage.

Something moved. The little girl came out to the front, holding her glass jar, like a dark lantern, outwards. Kate and I turned, wound our arms around each other, and got down to the car. We heard the horses.

It was all one substance now, one breath and density of blue. Along the back where the pasture was, the little, low black cows came in, in a line toward the house, with their sober sides one following the other. Where each went looked like simply where nothing