Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather — Read

Lucy often spent the long hot evenings in Sebastian's music room, lying on the sofa, with the big windows open and the lights turned out. And how strange it was that she should be there, after all! Only last Christmas, when she went home, she had never been inside this room, and had thought herself fortunate to catch a glimpse of Sebastian coming out of the doorway downstairs.

This summer there would be no slowing-down to the village pace. No walking about the town for hours and hours in the moonlight: down to the post-office and home again; out to the little Lutheran church at the north end. At this hour she used often to be sitting on the church steps, looking up at that far-away moon; everything so still about her, everything so wide awake within her. When she couldn't sit still any longer, there was nothing to do but to hurry along the sidewalks again; diving into black tents of shadow under the motionless, thick-foliaged maple trees, then out into the white moonshine. And always one had to elude people. Harry and the town boys had their place, but on nights like this she liked to be alone. She wondered she hadn't worn a trail in the sidewalks about the Lutheran church and the old high school. She wondered that her heart hadn't burst in those long vacations, when there was no human image she could hold up against the summer night; when she was alone out there, looking up at the moon from the bottom of a well. She loved her own little town, but it was a heartbreaking love, like loving the dead who cannot answer back.