Indian Summer

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Indian Summer, by Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings
NEW BORZOI NOVELS
FALL, 1922
The Quest Pio Baroja The Room G. B. Stern One of Ours Willa Cather A Lovely Day Henry Céard Mary Lee Geoffrey Dennis Tutors’ Lane Wilmarth Lewis The Promised Isle Laurids Bruun The Return Walter de la Mare The Bright Shawl Joseph Hergesheimer The Moth Decides Edward Alden Jewell Indian Summer Emily Grant Hutchings
INDIAN SUMMER
EMILY GRANT HUTCHINGS
ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. Published, July, 1922 Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper furnished by Perkins-Goodwin Co., New York, N. Y. Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To Edwin Hutchings My Inspiration

Tense quiet filled the crooked streets of Bromfield, the quiet that presages storm. Vine Larimore looked anxiously from the window. She was not afraid of tempests: she reveled in them. But a great fear had gripped her in the night. Why had Calvin failed to stop on his way home from the station? What business was it that took Calvin Stone to Rochester every week or two? Another sweetheart? She would not give the hideous thought house room. Was not she, Lavinia Larimore, the handsomest girl in Bromfield? Was not her father, next to the Calvins and the Stones, the most important man in the rusty old New York village? Had she not worn Calvin’s ring for three endless years? Most of the girls in her set were already married, and at New Year’s she had worn the green stockings for her seventeen-year-old sister, Isabel. The wedding dress she had made with so much care and skill, two years agone, hid its once modish lines beneath the cover of the cedar chest—the hope chest that Calvin had ordered for her at Stephen Trench’s shop.
Calvin’s father had promised them the old house on High Street, to be remodeled and furnished with the best that Rochester could provide. Mr. Trench had twice figured on the contract, and yet Calvin dallied. It was first one pretext and then another. Once, when he asked her what she wanted for her birthday—it was the latter part of May, and Lavinia would be twenty—she took her courage in her shaking hands and pleaded for a wedding. It was an unmaidenly thing. Bromfield would have branded her as bold. But Calvin saw in her abashed eyes the image of his own dereliction. To be sure he still loved her. He had always intended to make good his pledge. They would be married the middle of August, when the G. A. R. was giving a great excursion to New York City. That would be a honeymoon well worth the waiting.