Aurora Dawn Read Free Page A

smiles, “but anyway, my name’s Andrew Reale.”
    “How do you do, Mr. Reale?” said the girl. “It’s been fun talking to you.” With this she relapsed into a prim silence, smoothed
     her coat once more, and folded her gloved little hands in her lap with feline grace.
    Andrew, a little out of countenance, could not let it rest so. “And what’s yours?” he inquired, with as much genial music
     as he could instill into the syllables.
    The girl looked at him with the oddest expression, not unfriendly but quite unfathomable. “I don’t feel like telling you,”
     she said in a pleasant and definite tone.
    Our hero felt as though he had driven a car at sixty miles an hour into a rock wall. The three minutes that elapsed before
     the train drew into the station were longer than the three hours which had preceded them. Not another word could Andrew dredge
     out of his reservoir of easy civilities. He sat in silence until the girl left the car with an airy “So long,” which he barely
     acknowledged with a grated “Good-by.”
    As Andrew’s recollections took this turn he groaned aloud. “Rough road if you ain’t used to it,” commented the bus driver,
     a gaunt gray man in blue denims, taking a bite from a large meat sandwich and resting it on the ledge in front of him.
    “How much longer to Smithville?” asked Andrew, bracing himself on his bucking seat.
    “We’re right close,” answered the driver out of that side of his mouth which was unoccupied, “but you got to change to another
     bus and it’s a good twenty minutes from the depot to Father Stanfield’s.”
    Andrew started. “Who said I was going to see Father Stanfield?”
    “I been on this run a long time.” The driver threw a brief, knowing look at Andrew. “You a tobacco man?”
    “No,” said Andrew, and with the bitter reflection that conversations with strangers did not lead him into felicity, he became
     silent. The bus joggled, bumped, and whined its way through the deepening twilight. Andrew forced himself to attempt a cool
     estimate of his indiscretion with the Beautiful Brahmin. After much shuffling of the ingredients of the situation, he decided
     that the girl would probably forget him and everything he had said the moment she resumed her devotional reading in
Harper’s Bazaar;
also that she was an irritating child, and that some vestige of collegiate emotions was responsible for his passing interest.
     This palatable conclusion freed his thoughts for weightier matters during the rest of the journey.
    In Smithville, a town so entirely composed of low clapboard structures that it seemed to have skipped the brick-baking stage
     of history, Andrew changed to a bus labeled “SPECIAL–FOLD.” The coach was crowded with an oddly non-rural group of tourists,
     apparently in holiday spirits, well dressed for the most part and conversing noisily. As Andrew took his seat the driver dimmed
     the interior lights and started out along the asphalt highway, but soon swung off to a hard dirt road which climbed, descended,
     twisted, and wove like an Indian trail through thick overhanging trees that obscured the starlight. The forgotten scent of
     night dew on green leaves came agreeably to Andrew as the bus crushed past branches. Ten minutes of this plunge through forest
     darkness, and the bus came over a hill and around a bend and was suddenly out in the clear, rolling down a road that sloped
     into a wide valley. In the center of the valley floor Andrew could see a cluster of buildings, toward which the bus drove
     with increasing speed. The chatter of the tourists became more animated, and they began to put on their coats and pick up
     packages. Soon the bus turned through an illuminated archway of stone on which was fastened in white wooden letters the legend:
     “The Fold of the Faithful Shepherd.” Rattling the pebbles of a wide gravel driveway, the vehicle slowed and stopped before
     a large, auditorium-like building with a wide,