Publisher's Synopsis
A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain ofsilver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surroundingit. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, drivingtheir shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of streetwhen it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open, and lacks thelavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping-willowsabout the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost theonly roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at the other endof the village, the road rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock wall enclosingthe cemetery.The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful fringes of the Hatchardspruces, caught the straw hat of a young man just passing under them, and spun it cleanacross the road into the duck-pond.As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he wore city clothes, and that he was laughing with all his teeth, as the young andcareless laugh at such mishaps.Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that sometimes came over her when shesaw people with holiday faces made her draw back into the house and pretend to look forthe key that she knew she had already put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror with agilt eagle over it hung on the passage wall, and she looked critically at her reflection, wished for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel Balch, the girl whosometimes came from Springfield to spend a week with old Miss Hatchard, straightened thesunburnt hat over her small swarthy face, and turned out again into the sunshine."How I hate everything!" she murmured.The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and she had the street to herself.North Dormer is at all times an empty place, and at three o'clock on a June afternoon its fewable-bodied men are off in the fields or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languidhousehold drudge