Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/125

 neither Leander nor Uriah came home for dinner. Annie waited for them and when at last she gave up all hope of their coming, she locked the house and set out for a walk along the river.

It was a hot still afternoon, damp with the smell of growing corn turning to milk in the ear, and she walked slowly, stopping now and then to rest in the shade of the feathery willows and witch-hazel that grew in the fertile soil by the edge of the stream. Two little birds followed her, twittering and flying from bush to bush. Once while she was resting three quail came out from among the rows of corn to eat the crusts she brought them. The mud turtles, instead of slipping in alarm from logs and stones into the water, watched her with staring beady eyes, unafraid. The bluejays out of vulgar friendliness kept up a wild screeching and calling.

She wandered on and on, sadly and in a kind of dream, not knowing why it was she felt so tired and so confused, knowing only that the heat and the smell of the corn seemed to fill her with an overpowering desire to sleep. She had walked for miles and miles when she came at last to a spot which long ago she had chosen for her own. It lay in a wide bend of the meandering stream so that the fragment of earth was almost an island. In another year the spring floods would have cut through the narrow neck and isolated it, leaving it to be washed away bit by bit in the years that followed, into the distant ocean that Annie had never seen. No one had ploughed this land and it lay overgrown with a thicket of golden-rod and sumach and gentians. Here she had come alone many times. There