“Just once more, dear boy,” the girl whispered as she stood close before him in the hush of somnambulistic morning.
Arms interlocked, once more Nathan kissed her.
She bade him good-by in a whisper. She tiptoed up and on to the veranda. The door yielded. The Cuttner household still slept. She waved him a comradely farewell and slipped noiselessly inside.
Nathan hurried through the deserted town and into Spring Street. There was no white signal in Edith’s window. The Forge house was weirdly quiet.
From the other side the partition he could hear his father’s lumberous snoring, when he gained his bedroom. He undressed and slipped into an unmade bed as a trillion birds were beginning to awaken and hold tuneful conversation in a hundred thousand tree tops.
CHAPTER XVIII
ANOTHER CASE
I
June had come again. A class of eighteen girls, graduating from The Elms, were holding Commencement on the twenty-fifth.
Commencement Week was Mardi Gras for Mount Hadley in a refined, dignified, academic way. While The Elms was chiefly a college-preparatory school, many of its graduates were going abroad, becoming débutantes, receiving no further schooling. So Commencement Week and especially Commencement Night was a gala time. The little tree-bowered, hilltop town overflowed with parents, relatives and guests. Music, lights, laughter and love were as extravagantly squandered as the wealth of Nature poured out for the sensual gratification of insatiable summer.