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It was the spring of 1928, a few months before my twenty-first birthday, that I fell in love. I had returned from a winter in Boston with Cousin Eunice Blair, going to art school by day and to dances by night. I knew that I was a disappointment to Cousin Eunice because I could not center my interest upon anyone in particular.

"You can't go on this way indefinitely," she used to warn me. "I was married to your cousin John Blair before I was your age."

"Oh, I'm not in any hurry," I would tell her. "There's nobody special yet."

"Well, there ought to be," she would lament. "That comes of an old maid like Em bringing you up. Not that Em isn't a remarkable woman, but then what woman wants to be remarkable? She'll make an old maid of you yet. Heaven knows she'll never do that to Janice. No, it wouldn't surprise me if Janice married and settled down ahead of you. She's a handful now, I'll admit. But when I was young they used to say wanton kittens make sober cats."

At eighteen Janice was certainly soft and pretty as a kitten and as gay. She liked men and made no effort to conceal the fact. Her irresponsibility drove Aunt Em and Maggie distracted, but it was difficult to stay annoyed with her for long. I had been born with a strong sense of possessiveness, and Aunt Em's methodical training had only intensified my respect for personal property. But nothing was sacred to Janice. She had a genius for losing whatever she borrowed, and she borrowed every article I owned. In those years I was always finding myself left with one earring, or a dress minus its belt, or a glove or stocking without its mate. So it was with a certain relief that I looked forward to that summer when she would be in Europe with the Parker twins. It would be a pleasant change to come back to a room where for the next six months my belongings would stay as I placed them; where I could count on the clothes I expected to wear being in closet and drawers, not on a sister's back.

"I hope you won't find it too quiet here after Boston," Aunt Em said that night of my return while the house was recovering from the flurry of Janice's departure. "You'll have the little car," Aunt Em went on. "It's been put in order for you, and most of the dents Janice put in it have been taken out. That and your painting ought to keep you fairly busy."

"By the way," Uncle Wallace suggested, "they tell me they want to start an evening class in designing over in the new Recreation Building. Maybe Emily'd like to take it over and pass on some of the things she's been learning?"

Aunt Em became enthusiastic immediately. The Recreation Center where mill workers could take up weaving and pottery and dressmaking, and where certain evenings were devoted to games and dancing, was her pet project. She had fought for it against the criticism of certain directors and townspeople who felt it was unnecessary. Mill workers, they claimed, were not what they had been before the war, and shorter hours and higher wages ate up a large share of the profits. Still prosperity was in the air. A brief, false boom dominated all industry again, and the stock market rose higher and higher. The figures on the ticker tape made older men like Uncle Wallace and Mr. Parker shake their heads and wonder where it would end, and younger men plunge heavily into buying on margin. There was no more talk of Peace-Pipe dividends being passed. If quarterly profits didn't quite come up to expectations company stock holdings could easily be shifted to meet obligations. I hardly realized this at the time, for the talk of the mills was involved with the coming presidential election. If Mr. Hoover were elected it appeared that business and industry must continue to prosper.

But such matters were far from uppermost in my mind that spring night as I strolled down to the Recreation Center after supper. Aunt Em had a group of committee-women in the parlor, Uncle Wallace was busy in his study, and suddenly the evening stretched long before me.

Outside, the earthy April darkness made me feel lonely and restless. Buds showed on the beech trees where the street lights struck them, and I could smell the damp sweetness of the flowers Old Jo Kelly had under the cold frames behind the house. I saw a flashlight moving round the grape arbor and knew that he must be prowling about on his nightly rounds. In the uncertain light he looked more stooped and knotty than I remembered. I noticed as he came nearer that he moved stiffly as if he were some antiquated member of the mole family with whom I had always associated him.

"Nice night, Miss Emily," he answered my greeting. "Not the kind to walk alone."

"Well, you're alone, too," I reminded him.

"Oh, me! That's been my way so long I don't look for any other, but it's not the right pattern to follow, all the same. Two by two, it was meant to be since the animals went into the Ark. It's a queer thing," Old Jo went on, "to raise a family and lose them all one way or another."

"Except young Jo," I reminded him. "What's he up to, these days?"

"To no good, Miss Emily. That's one sure thing."

I had asked the question casually, and the sharpness of his answer startled me. Before I could put another question to him he was going on.

"I had to turn the boy out, and it comes hard to do that to your own grandson, but I couldn't let him go on biting the hand that's fed us all these years. He's down there now." He turned and pointed in the direction of the mill chimneys, dark across the river. "Making trouble. He got these views, you see, very mistaken views."

"Oh, well," I tried to comfort him, "Jo maybe thinks differently from you about a lot of things, but he couldn't ever be bad or wild."

"No, Jo's a good boy, that's the pity of it. I'd rather see him dead and buried like Mollie and the rest than going the way he's going. I tell you, Miss Emily, there's bad things brewing down there, and Jo's at the core of it all because he can't see straight."

"What sort of things?" I persisted.

"All this talk--organize, organize, that's all he and those cronies of his can think about, and unions and wages and closed shop and walk-outs and strikes. I know where it's going to end when all the talk turns into fists and bricks and blackjacks."

"Oh," I refused to take his dire predictions seriously, "what's a little talk? Besides there's never been any trouble at our mills."

"Well, I hope you're right. I'm too old to understand such things, but Jo's got the gift of talk, like my father that was killed in the Dublin riots. It's a dangerous gift. You'd swear black was white if he wanted you should think so. I can't sleep nights for thinking my Jo's there in Peace-Pipe Mills with a squint in his mind that no spectacles can cure."

"Don't worry." I was growing impatient at his talk, and the night was too fine to hear an old voice croaking beside me. "After young Jo's been working in the mills awhile he'll think differently about a lot of things."

"There's no getting round facts," he went on as I opened the gate. "The world's the same's it's always been and there's just two kinds of people in it--the haves and the have-nots. Mix 'em up, and they'll start right in all over again and be the same."

I was glad to be out of the sound of Old Jo's voice, which had a rusty insistence, like a cricket's plaint. Yet he had roused my curiosity about his grandson. It must have been a serious difference to cause a break like that between them.

Dr. Weeks was leaving his house when I passed. I hailed him as he opened the door of his car and threw in his familiar bag of instruments. Any car that belonged to the Doctor took on his look of shabby, dogged activity, no matter how spruce and factory-finished it had appeared a few weeks before. I smiled at the mud-spattered wheels and hood, the fenders whose scars of battle he had been too busy to have repaired. Off in the outlying country, people used to swear that they knew the sound of Dr. Weeks' engine coming over rough roads at night to answer some urgent summons. I have no doubt they did, for certainly there was some nervous, quick response between that machine and the man who guided it.

"Yes," he answered me after we had exchanged greetings, "I've got a busy night over on the mill side of town. Pneumonia case that looks bad, and a baby due before morning."

"You have got a lot on your hands," I said. "It'll be tomorrow when you get back."

"Well," he agreed, "always plenty doing over there. Someone coming or someone going, that's the way it is."

"Aunt Em says you ought to have an assistant now your practice has grown so."

"Now I'm not so young as I was," he corrected me. "That's what she really means. Well, maybe I will if I can find the right youngster. I've got my eye on a couple of interns right now. Good to see you back again, Emily. Hope you're planning to take the summer easy. You're a bit on the thin side, and it wouldn't do you any harm to take on a few more pounds. Not that you'll follow that piece of advice, I suppose?"

I laughed and shook my head as he studied me intently.

"You grow more like your father and Em every time I see you," he was going on. "Yes, you're Em all over again in modern dress. She wasn't much older than you the year I came to practice in Blairstown, and I thought--Oh, well, never mind what I thought--"

He gave an apologetic laugh that ended in a sigh as he got in and started the engine. Something about the way he spoke made me remember certain remarks I had heard about how Dr. Weeks had wanted to marry Aunt Em years ago. I wondered if the rumor were true, and why nothing had ever come of it. There he was driving off to his round of night visits, alone and past middle age, and there was Aunt Em surrounded by a ladies' committee discussing some good work or other. Somehow spring nights are apt to make the waste of human capacity for love and fulfillment seem more poignant then than at other seasons of the year. Or perhaps it only came of my being back in the limits of a smaller community. One felt somehow more aware of human relationships.

"A little town is like a lantern," Maggie Flynn used to say with a shrewd pursing of her lips. "Nothing's hid away from sight."

It may have been some intimate quality of the night, or my own heightened senses that made me unusually receptive to my surroundings. Each familiar house and yard I passed, each tree and fence and postbox arrested me as if I were marking them for the first and last time. Perhaps the river mist had something to do with what I felt; perhaps it was only a sudden sense of place such as all of us have experienced at some time or other. I only know that all this was part of that night in April which must forever punctuate my life, as an exclamation point stands out boldly on the page of a book.

The Wawickett River was swollen with spring rains. I could hear the noise of its waters going over the dam long before I set foot on the upper bridge, as if it were a human presence hailing me. I could not see the torrent rushing under me. But I felt the power that charged it, that seemed stronger than the span of bridge that ordinarily rose so high above it, and that was so bound to me from childhood. My cheeks and hair grew damp with misty spray. A chill wildness was in the atmosphere, so strong and fresh and full of vigor that even the smell of chemicals and machinery and factory smoke could not overpower it.

In that misty stretch between the two sides, I felt that time did not count. It was as if the bridge had become a sort of no man's land where the past and present might meet and mingle as they do sometimes in our dreams. It would not have surprised me to find my own father swinging towards me with his long, easy strides, or my mother leaning at the rail with a child pressed against her skirts. Now I know that the future was there, too, that every step I took brought me nearer to it.

The clamor of the rushing water had taken all other sounds. I heard no footsteps, my own or those that must have been coming behind me. So I was startled when a man passed by me, then stopped and hesitated as if uncertain whether to speak or not. When he did I realized that he was not the mill hand I had taken him to be.

"Are you Emily Blair?" His voice was young and pleasant.

"Why, yes." I stopped short. "Yes, I'm Emily Blair, but I don't know who you are?"

"We met at a party." He laughed. "You were seven years old and it lasted from four to six."

"Wait a minute." My mind raced back as I tried to catch at a name that eluded me. "Then you must be the Parker twins' cousin. I've forgotten your name, but I remember you didn't bring me any present."

This time we both laughed.

"Harry Collins--do you remember now? I've been working in your mills since January. Stopped to see you just now, and they said I'd find you if I walked this way. I guess your uncle forgot to tell you I was coming over after dinner. Do you really have to go over to the Recreation Building?"

"No, it was just something to do."

"Let's go back then." We turned and fell into step together. "We'll sit in your parlor and look at the family photograph album."

"Oh"--I shook my head and drops of mist ran off my hair--"we can't do that because Aunt Em and her committee are there, and besides there isn't any family album."

That wasn't a funny remark, and yet it made us laugh. I know now that we laughed because we had both been lonely on a spring night.