A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end ofthe one street of North Dormer, and stood on thedoorstep.

　　It was the beginning of a June afternoon. Thespringlike transparent sky shed a rain of silversunshine on the roofs of the village, and on thepastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little windmoved among the round white clouds on the shoulders ofthe hills, driving their shadows across the fields anddown the grassy road that takes the name of street whenit passes through North Dormer. The place lies highand in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the moreprotected New England villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces infront of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the onlyroadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and thepoint where, at the other end of the village, the roadrises above the church and skirts the black hemlockwall enclosing the cemetery.

　　The little June wind, frisking down the street, shookthe doleful fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught thestraw hat of a young man just passing under them, andspun it clean across the road into the duck-pond.

　　As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall'sdoorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he worecity clothes, and that he was laughing with all histeeth, as the young and careless laugh at such mishaps.

　　Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking thatsometimes came over her when she saw people withholiday faces made her draw back into the house andpretend to look for the key that she knew she hadalready put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirrorwith a gilt eagle over it hung on the passage wall, andshe looked critically at her reflection, wished for thethousandth time that she had blue eyes like AnnabelBalch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield tospend a week with old Miss Hatchard, straightened thesunburnt hat over her small swarthy face, and turnedout again into the sunshine.

　　"How I hate everything!" she murmured.

　　The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, andshe had the street to herself. North Dormer is at alltimes an empty place, and at three o'clock on a Juneafternoon its few able-bodied men are off in the fieldsor woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languidhousehold drudgery.

　　The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger,and looking about her with the heightened attentionproduced by the presence of a stranger in a familiarplace. What, she wondered, did North Dormer look liketo people from other parts of the world? She herselfhad lived there since the age of five, and had longsupposed it to be a place of some importance. Butabout a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopalclergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every otherSunday--when the roads were not ploughed up by hauling--to hold a service in the North Dormer church, hadproposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take theyoung people down to Nettleton to hear an illustratedlecture on the Holy Land; and the dozen girls and boyswho represented the future of North Dormer had beenpiled into a farm-waggon, driven over the hills toHepburn, put into a way-train and carried to Nettleton.

　　In the course of that incredible day Charity Royallhad, for the first and only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with plate-glass fronts,tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened toa gentleman saying unintelligible things beforepictures that she would have enjoyed looking at if hisexplanations had not prevented her from understandingthem. This initiation had shown her that North Dormerwas a small place, and developed in her a thirst forinformation that her position as custodian of thevillage library had previously failed to excite. For amonth or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedlyinto the dusty volumes of the Hatchard MemorialLibrary; then the impression of Nettleton began tofade, and she found it easier to take North Dormer asthe norm of the universe than to go on reading.

　　The sight of the stranger once more revived memories ofNettleton, and North Dormer shrank to its real size. Asshe looked up and down it, from lawyer Royall's fadedred house at one end to the white church at the other,she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, aweather-beaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandonedof men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, andall the forces that link life to life in moderncommunities. It had no shops, no theatres, nolectures, no "business block"; only a church that wasopened every other Sunday if the state of the roadspermitted, and a library for which no new books hadbeen bought for twenty years, and where the old onesmouldered undisturbed on the damp shelves. Yet CharityRoyall had always been told that she ought to considerit a privilege that her lot had been cast in NorthDormer. She knew that, compared to the place she hadcome from, North Dormer represented all the blessingsof the most refined civilization. Everyone in thevillage had told her so ever since she had been broughtthere as a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said toher, on a terrible occasion in her life: "My child, youmust never cease to remember that it was Mr. Royall whobrought you down from the Mountain."She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from thescarred cliff that lifted its sullen wall above thelesser slopes of Eagle Range, making a perpetualbackground of gloom to the lonely valley. The Mountainwas a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptlyfrom the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast itsshadow over North Dormer. And it was like a greatmagnet drawing the clouds and scattering them in stormacross the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky,there trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, itdrifted to the Mountain as a ship drifts to awhirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, torn up andmultiplied, to sweep back over the village in rain anddarkness.

　　Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but sheknew it was a bad place, and a shame to have come from,and that, whatever befell her in North Dormer, sheought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, toremember that she had been brought down from there, andhold her tongue and be thankful. She looked up at theMountain, thinking of these things, and tried as usualto be thankful. But the sight of the young man turningin at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the visionof the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she feltashamed of her old sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer,and jealously aware of Annabel Balch of Springfield,opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on gloriesgreater than the glories of Nettleton.

　　"How I hate everything!" she said again.

　　Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hingedgate. Passing through it, she walked down a brick pathto a queer little brick temple with white woodencolumns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed intarnished gold letters: "The Honorius Hatchard MemorialLibrary, 1832."Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed thephrase, and put forward, as her only claim todistinction, the fact that she was his great-niece.

　　For Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of thenineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. Asthe marble tablet in the interior of the libraryinformed its infrequent visitors, he had possessedmarked literary gifts, written a series of paperscalled "The Recluse of Eagle Range," enjoyed theacquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-GreeneHalleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fevercontracted in Italy. Such had been the sole linkbetween North Dormer and literature, a link piouslycommemorated by the erection of the monument whereCharity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon,sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of thedeceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader inhis grave than she did in his library.

　　Entering her prison-house with a listless step she tookoff her hat, hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva,opened the shutters, leaned out to see if there wereany eggs in the swallow's nest above one of thewindows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk,drew out a roll of cotton lace and a steel crochethook. She was not an expert workwoman, and it had takenher many weeks to make the half-yard of narrow lacewhich she kept wound about the buckram back of adisintegrated copy of "The Lamplighter." But there wasno other way of getting any lace to trim her summerblouse, and since Ally Hawes, the poorest girl in thevillage, had shown herself in church with enviabletransparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook hadtravelled faster. She unrolled the lace, dug the hookinto a loop, and bent to the task with furrowed brows.

　　Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised hereyes she knew that the young man she had seen going inat the Hatchard gate had entered the library.

　　Without taking any notice of her he began to moveslowly about the long vault-like room, his hands behindhis back, his short-sighted eyes peering up and downthe rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached thedesk and stood before her.

　　"Have you a card-catalogue?" he asked in a pleasantabrupt voice; and the oddness of the question causedher to drop her work.

　　"A WHAT?""Why, you know----" He broke off, and she becameconscious that he was looking at her for the firsttime, having apparently, on his entrance, included herin his general short-sighted survey as part of thefurniture of the library.

　　The fact that, in discovering her, he lost the threadof his remark, did not escape her attention, and shelooked down and smiled. He smiled also.

　　"No, I don't suppose you do know," he correctedhimself. "In fact, it would be almost a pity----"She thought she detected a slight condescension in histone, and asked sharply: "Why?""Because it's so much pleasanter, in a small librarylike this, to poke about by one's self--with the helpof the librarian."He added the last phrase so respectfully that she wasmollified, and rejoined with a sigh: "I'm afraid Ican't help you much.""Why?" he questioned in his turn; and she replied thatthere weren't many books anyhow, and that she'd hardlyread any of them. "The worms are getting at them," sheadded gloomily.

　　"Are they? That's a pity, for I see there are some goodones." He seemed to have lost interest in theirconversation, and strolled away again, apparentlyforgetting her. His indifference nettled her, and shepicked up her work, resolved not to offer him the leastassistance. Apparently he did not need it, for hespent a long time with his back to her, lifting down,one after another, the tall cob-webby volumes from adistant shelf.

　　"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed; and looking up she saw thathe had drawn out his handkerchief and was carefullywiping the edges of the book in his hand. The actionstruck her as an unwarranted criticism on her care ofthe books, and she said irritably: "It's not my faultif they're dirty."He turned around and looked at her with revivinginterest. "Ah--then you're not the librarian?""Of course I am; but I can't dust all these books.

　　Besides, nobody ever looks at them, now Miss Hatchard'stoo lame to come round.""No, I suppose not." He laid down the book he had beenwiping, and stood considering her in silence. Shewondered if Miss Hatchard had sent him round to pryinto the way the library was looked after, and thesuspicion increased her resentment. "I saw you goinginto her house just now, didn't I?" she asked, with theNew England avoidance of the proper name. She wasdetermined to find out why he was poking about amongher books.

　　"Miss Hatchard's house? Yes--she's my cousin and I'mstaying there," the young man answered; adding, as ifto disarm a visible distrust: "My name is Harney--Lucius Harney. She may have spoken of me.""No, she hasn't," said Charity, wishing she could havesaid: "Yes, she has.""Oh, well----" said Miss Hatchard's cousin with alaugh; and after another pause, during which itoccurred to Charity that her answer had not beenencouraging, he remarked: "You don't seem strong onarchitecture."Her bewilderment was complete: the more she wished toappear to understand him the more unintelligible hisremarks became. He reminded her of the gentleman whohad "explained" the pictures at Nettleton, and theweight of her ignorance settled down on her again likea pall.

　　"I mean, I can't see that you have any books on the oldhouses about here. I suppose, for that matter, thispart of the country hasn't been much explored. Theyall go on doing Plymouth and Salem. So stupid. Mycousin's house, now, is remarkable. This place musthave had a past--it must have been more of a placeonce." He stopped short, with the blush of a shy manwho overhears himself, and fears he has been voluble.

　　"I'm an architect, you see, and I'm hunting up oldhouses in these parts."She stared. "Old houses? Everything's old in NorthDormer, isn't it? The folks are, anyhow."He laughed, and wandered away again.

　　"Haven't you any kind of a history of the place?

　　I think there was one written about 1840: a book orpamphlet about its first settlement," he presently saidfrom the farther end of the room.

　　She pressed her crochet hook against her lip andpondered. There was such a work, she knew: "NorthDormer and the Early Townships of Eagle County." Shehad a special grudge against it because it was a limpweakly book that was always either falling off theshelf or slipping back and disappearing if one squeezedit in between sustaining volumes. She remembered, thelast time she had picked it up, wondering how anyonecould have taken the trouble to write a book aboutNorth Dormer and its neighbours: Dormer, Hamblin,Creston and Creston River. She knew them all, mere lostclusters of houses in the folds of the desolate ridges:

　　Dormer, where North Dormer went for its apples; CrestonRiver, where there used to be a paper-mill, and itsgrey walls stood decaying by the stream; and Hamblin,where the first snow always fell. Such were theirtitles to fame.

　　She got up and began to move about vaguely before theshelves. But she had no idea where she had last putthe book, and something told her that it was going toplay her its usual trick and remain invisible. It wasnot one of her lucky days.

　　"I guess it's somewhere," she said, to prove her zeal;but she spoke without conviction, and felt that herwords conveyed none.

　　"Oh, well----" he said again. She knew he was going,and wished more than ever to find the book.

　　"It will be for next time," he added; and picking upthe volume he had laid on the desk he handed it to her.

　　"By the way, a little air and sun would do this good;it's rather valuable."He gave her a nod and smile, and passed out.