Kent for a month or so after the tragedy was extremely busy helping to disentangle Levine's complicated real estate holdings. It was found that he held heavily mortgaged second growth timber lands in the northern part of the State and Kent spent a month superintending a re-survey of them. He was very much broken up by Levine's death, and welcomed the heavy work.
In spite of Lydia's deep affection for Levine, she did not feel his death as much as Amos did. For after all, Lydia was young, gloriously young, and with a forward-turned face. Amos had lost in John his only real friend, the only human being who in some ways had helped to fill in the hopeless gap left by his wife's death. And Amos, though still a young man, kept his face turned backward.
After her first wild grief had expended itself, Lydia found that, after all, Levine's tragic death had not surprised her. She realized that ever since she had known Charlie Jackson, she had been vaguely haunted by a fear of just such an ending.
July slipped into a breathless, dusty August. Lydia worked very hard, making herself tasks when necessary work was done. She put up fruit. She worked in the garden. She took up the dining-room carpet and oiled the floor and made rugs. After she had had her swim in the late afternoon, she would take up her old position on the front doorstep, to sew or read or to dream with her eyes on the pine.
How silently, how broodingly it had stood there, month in, month out, year after year! What did it feel, Lydia wondered, now that the Indians were gone? Was it glad that Levine had been punished?
Billy, trundling up the dusty road from the law office on his bicycle, late each afternoon, would stop for a moment or two. Since the tragedy, not a day had gone by that Lydia had not seen him.
"The drought is something frightful," he said to Lydia one afternoon in late August, wiping the sweat and dust from his face. "This is the ninth week without rain. The corn is ruined. I never knew anything like this and Dad says he hasn't either."
"Our garden died weeks ago," said Lydia, listlessly.
Billy looked at her keenly. "Are you feeling any more cheerful, Lyd?"
Lydia turned her gaze from the burning brown meadows to Billy's tanned, rugged face.