To learn more about the project or give feedback on the quality of a recording, please visit aka.ms slash audiobook. Summer. By Edith Wharton. I. A girl came out of Lawyer Royals 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 spring-like transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping willows about the duck pond and the Norway spruces in front of the hatchet gate cast almost the only roadside shadow between Lawyer Royals house and the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery. The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful fringes of the hatchet spruces, caught the straw hat of a young man just passing under them and spun it clean across the road into the duck pond. As he ran to fish it out the girl on Lawyer Royals doorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he wore city clothes, and that he was laughing with all his teeth as the young and careless laugh at such mishaps. Her heart contracted a little and the shrinking that sometimes came over her when she saw people with holiday faces made her draw back into the house and pretend to look for the key that she knew she had already put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror with a gilt 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 who sometimes came from Springfield to spend a week with old miss Hatchet, straightened the sunburned hat over her small swarthy face, and turned out again into the How I hate everything! she murmured. The young man had passed through the hatchet 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