"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 few able-bodied men are off in
the fields or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid household
drudgery.
The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger, and looking about
her with the heightened attention produced by the presence of a stranger
in a familiar place. What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like to
people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived there
since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of some
importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal
clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other Sunday--when the roads
were not ploughed up by hauling--to hold a service in the North Dormer
church, had proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the young
people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated lecture on the Holy
Land; and the dozen girls and boys who represented the future of North
Dormer had been piled into a farm-waggon, driven over the hills to
Hepburn, put into a way-train and carried to Nettleton.
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