Indian Summer

Emily Grant Hutchings

Tense quiet filled the crooked streets of Bromfield, the quiet that presages storm. Vine Larimore looked anxiously from the window. She was not afraid of tempests: she reveled in them. But a great fear had gripped her in the night. Why had Calvin failed to stop on his way home from the station? What business was it that took Calvin Stone to Rochester every week or two? Another sweetheart? She would not give the hideous thought house room. Was not she, Lavinia Larimore, the handsomest girl in Bromfield? Was not her father, next to the Calvins and the Stones, the most important man in the rusty old New York village? Had she not worn Calvin's ring for three endless years? Most of the girls in her set were already married, and at New Year's she had worn the green stockings for her seventeen-year-old sister, Isabel. The wedding dress she had made with so much care and skill, two years agone, hid its once modish lines beneath the cover of the cedar chest—the hope chest that Calvin had ordered for her at Stephen Trench's shop