Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe

by Joanna E. Wood

CHAPTER IV.

Andrew was eager to see Miss Moore again,—although he felt a masculine irritation against her for taking umbrage at well-meant and thoroughly sensible advice. Perhaps at the bottom of this there lay a soupçon of annoyance with himself, that he had spoken so abruptly to her upon the subject, mingled with a compassionate remembrance of what Mr. Morris had told him of her delicacy. He was very glad to find an excuse to go up to his woods, where they stretched past the Morris house; and a pretence that he was looking for suitable trees to cut down for foundations for his hay-stacks, justified him in his own eyes for strolling among his trees in very leisurely, but apparently disinterested fashion. He must, however, have been paying some attention to the house on his right, for when Mrs. Morris ran out from the old orchard behind the house to the barns, calling, "Father, Father, where are you? Come here, quick, do, hey Father!" Andrew promptly responded, leaping over the fence and speedily reaching her side.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Land of love! But I'm glad you've come, if she did call you long-legged: all the better for her now if you be. I hope she ain't fell by this time. Wonder where Father is. I never seen such a man; always gone when he's wanted. I declare it beats me where he gets to. It's enough to drive—"

"What is it, Mrs. Morris?" demanded Andrew, his heart misgiving him. "Can't I help?"

"'Deed you can! And to think of her calling you long-legged, and the very next day having to depend on you for her life, may be, or to save one of her own legs being broke—"

Mrs. Morris got no further. A little faint cry struck Andrew's ears, coming from the direction of the orchard.

"For heaven's sake, come on, and show me what's wrong," he cried. "Don't stand there palavering."

"Why, sakes alive! Don't you know? Miss Moore got up in a tree and—"

But by this time they were in the orchard. A glance explained the situation to Andrew.

High up on an apple-tree branch stood Miss Moore, clinging with both arms round a limb above her, her face white as death, her eyes dilated with fear. A ladder's head was within six inches of her feet. Andrew was up it in an instant. He knew the trouble. Only last year a hired man of his had ascended a tree to pick fruit. He was seized with this ague of dizzy fear, and flinging himself against a stout limb, had held on like grim death. It took two men to get him down; his terror made him clasp the tree convulsively. It was days before he was well again.

Miss Moore had evidently not seen him, nor heard his coming. As he slipped his arms about her, she gave a great start, and turned to look at him with eyes which seemed to expect some tangible shape of horror, evolved out of her illogical and intangible fear.

When she saw who it was, her eyes filled and her lips trembled.

"Oh, take me down. Do take me down."

"Yes, indeed, I will," said Andrew, with quiet assurance. "Let go of the branch."

She shuddered. The spell of the vertigo was yet upon her. Her arms tightened upon the bough.

"Do take me down," she pleaded childishly. "I'm frightened."

"My dear, you must loose your hold," said Andrew, steadily.

Then, with one arm about her, he reached up and one by one undid the clinging fingers, gathering them into his palm as he did so. With a force that seemed cruel, he pulled down the slender wrist and placed her hand upon his shoulder. Her face expressed the agony of dizziness. With blind instinct she put her other arm about his neck and clasped it close. He felt her form relax, and braced himself in time to sustain her dead weight as she fainted.

The descent of the ladder was easy enough. Andrew had carried many a bag of wheat up and down his steep granary stairs. The principle of balancing an inert woman is much the same. He carried her into the house and laid her down upon the broad home-made couch, covered with dark brown calico, that stood in the kitchen. Mrs. Morris had talked volubly during these proceedings, but only after he laid Judith down, did Andrew begin to hear what she was saying.

"She does look gashly!" said Mrs. Morris. "Whatever would I do if she was to be took! And this minute she looks fit for laying out."

"Goodness alive," said Andrew. "Can't you do anything to bring her to? Bathe her face, or something?"

Mrs. Morris flew for water and brought it, trembling. "I say, Andrew, can't you do it? I'm so shook—I never could bear to touch corpses, and—"

Andrew gave her a venomous look, dipped his handkerchief in the water, and began clumsily to bathe the girl's brow. Her senses were already reasserting themselves. She put up her hands to her face: they fluttered nervously. Andrew caught one of them and held it between his own brown ones, noting that her wrists were red, almost bruised, creased in rough outline of the apple-tree's bark.

"Will you give me some water?" she asked.

Mrs. Morris brought a blue and white cup. Andrew, kneeling on the braided mat before the couch, slipped his arm under Judith and put the cup to her lips. She took a mouthful, and fell into a shivering fit of cold.

Mrs. Morris rose to this emergency. Ague was an old familiar friend; "shakes" had no terrors for her. In a moment she had found a thick coverlet and placed it over Judith.

"You stay by her," she said to Andrew, "and I'll make her a draught of hot elderberry syrup in two shakes."

Then she was off to the lean-to kitchen, and they heard her rattling among her kettles. Andrew still knelt upon the mat holding Judith's hand with praiseworthy absent-mindedness.

"Are you better now?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, her chin quivering as she tried to keep her teeth from chattering. "It was so good of you to take me down. So awfully good. I'm very stupid, but I couldn't help it."

"Of course you couldn't. I had a man who behaved much worse than you did in the same situation. Ever so much. Indeed, you behaved very well."

There was silence; then Judith began: "Mr. Cutler, I—er—called you a name to Mrs. Morris the other day."

"Did you? What did you call me?"

"Will you forgive me?"

"Tell me what you called me first."

"Oh!"

"Forgiveness is worth that, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes. I called you—long-legged, and—I think, I said you were rude."

Andrew suppressed an inclination to laugh, being minded not to belittle the value of his absolution.

"Well," he said, "I'll forgive the first part of it because you see it's so awfully true, and as for the second, well—I think you meant 'sensible'; anyhow, I forgive you for it all."

Miss Moore experienced a mental sensation she would have called "curling up." A pretty cool specimen, this young farmer! She had thought he would have fallen into faltering excuses. She was really ill, though faint—cold. Mrs. Morris came in with the steaming cup of black syrup. Judith had forgotten till that moment that Andrew held her hand: of course, Andrew had been unconscious of it all along. But as Mrs. Morris appeared in the door a swift intuition of the state of affairs came to Judith. She gave a little gesture of withdrawal, and Andrew released her lingers slowly, rising with praiseworthy calmness to get himself a chair.

While Judith tried to drink the hot syrup, Mrs. Morris explained that Miss Moore had never seen a bird's nest with eggs in it, and there being an oriole's nest in the apple-tree, "Father" had put up the ladder for her to see it, and—Andrew knew the rest.

"Tree fright is a lot worse than stage fright," said Miss Moore: oracularly, but this was a dark saying to both her listeners. Mrs. Morris talked and talked. Miss Moore had long since lain back on the big brown pillow; her face was flushed, her eyes sleepy. Andrew would have listened to Mrs. Morris forever, provided he could have watched Miss Moore at the same time. But at length Mrs. Morris rose and moved towards her summer kitchen, intimating that her chores needed tending to, so Andrew perforce had to take his leave.

"Good-bye, just now," he said. "May I come back and take you to see some birds' nests nearer the ground?"

"Oh, do," she said. "And I haven't thanked you half enough for helping me to-day."

"Indeed you have. Good-bye, just now."

"Good-bye," she said softly.

He was just at the door, when a soft but interrogative "Ahem" from the couch attracted his attention. He turned. Miss Judith Moore did not look at him, but with cautious precision she drew the dark blue coverlet up a tiny bit. His eyes became riveted upon the point of a bronze slipper that gradually grew from the shadow of the covering until a whole foot was revealed—a foot at a defiant pose and wearing a little bronze slipper with an exaggeratedly high heel. Andrew's eyes grew daring, and he half turned.

Miss Moore seemed to telescope, for head and foot disappeared beneath the coverlet at once. He paused a moment, and then departed.

As he went across the fields he thought of the little scene he had left, and, more shame to him, his thoughts were not concerned wholly with the bad effects of wearing high heels, nor yet of the impropriety of Miss Moore's retaliation for his high and mighty granting of forgiveness. Indeed, as he sat for a moment kicking his heels on the top bar of the first fence, he was speculating solely as to whether "they" were open-work or not! He was thinking he would have given his best gun to be able to tell, and summed up his reflections with a dissatisfied little growl, "Of all the mean, miserable, stingy glimpses!"

As he walked along, his face changed. After climbing the hill-side to his garden wall, he passed an apple-tree in hill bloom at the gate. He paused beneath it. His face was pale and serious, his eyes tender. He thought of Judith's russet head as it had leaned upon his shoulder: he looked down at his old velvet coat, where it had rested, and fancied some vague perfume rose from it to his face. He remembered he had held her in his arms, and recalled the red marks upon her delicate wrists. Those wrists had been curved about his neck.

He could not realize the full height and depth of what had come to him, but his whole being groped for the truth even as he stood beneath the tree.

As he walked slowly up the narrow bricked walk to the house, he noticed how the chestnut roots and the frost together had heaved up the bricks and rendered the walk irregular. He wondered anxiously if she could walk over it in those shoes, and as he reached his door, which stood open under its old-fashioned porch, revealing a dusky cool vista beyond, he suddenly saw, as in a vision, a woman's shape stand between the lintels, waiting for him!—a woman with slender hands outstretched in welcome, grave grey eyes, soft hair, tender lips: the woman he loved: his own. As this last thought, the sweetest thought man's heart holds, formulated itself in his mind, Andrew knew the truth. He turned down the path, past the apple-tree, through the lindens again, and across his fields, until once more he looked upon the house wherein she rested. He looked at it long from the shelter of his trees, his whole existence resolved into a chaos of uncertain self-communings, until a voice like an angel's seemed to whisper of comfort and to sing of hope.

Then he went home, and at four o'clock betook himself to the school-house to attend the meeting in regard to appointing a new teacher.

The village school-house stood at the end of the street farthest away from the Cutler homestead. It was a bleak, stone building, with a wooden porch—a gaunt, bare, uninviting-looking building, with none of those picturesque adjuncts of climbing vines and overarching trees, associated so often with thoughts of a country school.

It had a perky, self-satisfied little bell-house on top, and its date, 1865, was rudely carved on a big stone in the peak of the north gable. It had eight windows—three at each side, two at one end. In winter, the wood for the box stove was always piled up outside before these. There were always complaints of the school-house being dark in winter, yet it never occurred to any one to select a different site for the wood-pile.

The interior of the school-house corresponded in dinginess to the outside. The plaster walls were sadly soiled, particularly beneath the broad window seats, where the children sat kicking their heels whilst they ate their lunches at noon, for the scholars were drawn principally from the outlying farm-houses. A long length of irregularly jointed pipes led the smoke from the box stove at the end to an exit over the teacher's desk. Little tin pails were hung at intervals along this, to catch the black liquid distilled from the soot. The other adornments of the room consisted of a long blackboard, a globe, and some big lettered tablets, round which the teacher was wont to gather the infant class and teach them their letters.

In the politics of a little village like Ovid, the smallest public measures became magnified to grotesque importance. The usual custom was for the school trustees to sit in private session first, when any particular business was to be arranged, say, the selection of a teacher, and when this was arranged the doors were flung wide and the meeting was "open." These open school meetings were always well attended. They were the classes in which embryotic statesmen acquired the political alphabet, the ABC of political procedure, the manner of putting a motion, taking a vote, making a nomination, and the correct order of precedence governing the motions and amendments. There too, was acquired the first great requisite of a politician,—the art of saying non-committal things in a most convincing tone of voice, and of treating with much politeness those whom one held in secret abhorrence.

There were two offices, those of school trustee and pathmaster, and these two were equal in power and glory. True, they were barren honours, but they ofttimes led to better things. The school trustee had the higher position in one respect: he was chosen by the people at first hand. The pathmaster, upon the contrary, was appointed by the Council. It is needless to say the school trustee smiled in calm superiority at the pathmaster, and the latter in turn felt the making of the roads wherein the whole community walked, was as holy an office as the task of guiding the juvenile wanderers into the school, and seeing that when there, they trod the common road to knowledge, it being well known that there is no royal road thereto.

When Andrew arrived at the school-house, the other two trustees, Hiram Green who kept the village store, and Hen Braddon, were present. They immediately entered upon a discussion of the teacher question. The application of Sam Symmons' Suse lay upon the table, written out upon foolscap paper, in big round hand, with many flourishing capitals, rejoicing in "shaded" heads and beautifully involved tails.

"I tell you Suse is a good list with a pen," said Hen Braddon, with conviction, and the other two agreed. "She ain't no slouch at spelling either," said Hiram Green. The other two agreed with this also. Then Andrew took up his parable.

"Yes," he said, "Suse is quite smart, and being bred right here in Ovid seems to give her a claim to the school. I suggest we just appoint her."

"Well, it's as well to be cautious," said Hiram Green.

"It'll save advertising," said Hen Braddon.

"Suppose we just decide on it then," said Andrew.

"Well," said Hiram Green, "well, I ain't got no objections to Suse as Suse, but what I think is, two hundred and fifty is enough to pay a woman for what a man got three hundred."

Andrew sneered. He didn't have a sweet expression when he did that.

"Don't you think," he said, gravely—"don't you think Suse might include cleaning the school-house and lighting the fires in winter for the two-fifty, being she's a woman?"

"No," said Hiram, reflectively; "old Mrs. Slick has done it so long."

"But it would save twenty-five dollars," argued Andrew, with meek persuasion.

"Well," said Hiram, "Mrs. Slick needs that. She's owin' already, and she might's well draw the money off the school taxes as off the council."

"Oh, Mrs. Slick is owing, is she?" queried Andrew, with solicitude. "I hope she pays you all right. Well, about Suse. Being she's a woman, don't you think you could fix it so's she'd chop the wood for winter? That would save twelve dollars."

A nasty red flickered up to Hiram's face. He had thought Andrew's proposition about the taking care of the school thoroughly genuine.

"Oh," he said, "I ain't particular whether she gets the three hundred or the two-fifty, though I hope you won't deny when nomination comes round that you deliberately threw away fifty dollars of the people's money."

"You maybe quite sure I won't deny anything that's true," said Andrew, hotly. "And as for throwing away the people's money, well—some of the teachers, so far as I can recollect, got their salaries raised pretty frequently. Of course, I wasn't on the School Board then, so I only heard why it was done. I can't say of my own knowledge."

The fact was that Mr. Hiram Green had several unappetizing daughters, and, as he had been school trustee almost ever since any one remembered, it seemed good in his sight that the teachers, over whom he wielded such paternal authority in such a parental way, should return the compliment by adopting a filial rôle, and become sons not only in spirit but in name. But, alas, for the vanity of human wishes! the perfidious teachers had accepted all Hiram's kindness, had slept in the best bedroom and partaken of his best fruit, had ridden by him to town and accompanied the Misses Green to tea-meetings and festivals, had abode in the Green household over Sundays, had gone with them to church, and at choir practice had faithfully served them, and then, with the extra money they had been able to save through Hiram's hospitality and the fortuitous "raise" in their salaries, they had shaken the dust of Ovid from off their feet, and departed to fresh fields and pastures new, to marry the girls they had been engaged to all along or to study for one of the higher professions. Never a one of them all left a love gauge with a Miss Green, and in the bosom of the Green family many were the revilings cast upon those teachers, who, with a goodly countenance and a better appetite, had devoured Mrs. Green's layer cakes and preserves, feasted upon Hiram's peaches and driven his horses upon the false pretences of "intentions." However, in fairness to the teachers, one must remember that "some have greatness thrust upon them." Foolish, indeed, would be the man who deliberately offended his trustees, and Hiram's hospitality was usually somewhat pressingly proffered.

This last teacher—bad luck to him!—had described himself in his application as a single man, when at the beginning of the summer vacation he sent in his certificates for consideration in response to Hiram's advertisement, and before these holidays had passed he married and came alone to Ovid to take up school in the autumn, and had eaten five teas and two dinners at Hiram Green's before he asked the eldest daughter, with whom he frequently found himself alone, where she thought he could rent a suitable house for himself and wife.

"This is very sudden," murmured Miss Green.

"Well, I don't know," he said, in a practical tone of voice, "I've been nearly two weeks away from her now, and I can't stand it much longer."

Miss Green gathered his meaning then, and never another tea did that teacher sit down to in Hiram Green's, and indeed the atmosphere of Ovid had been made so frigid for the little smooth-haired, blue-eyed girl he had married, that he soon sent her away, and finding he could not do without her, finally sent in his own resignation. The Greens had a big family connection, and Ovid was made a cold place for those whom they did not like. The Cutler house on the hill and poor old Sam's stubborn door were about the only portals in Ovid that an enemy of the Greens might pass.

Henry Braddon acted as a soft, effective buffer between Hiram and Andrew, who both always wanted their own way, and wanted it at once.

"Best let Suse have the three hundred," said he: "old Reilly will be foreclosing on Sam soon if he don't raise the money somehow." Now, Reilly was the local usurer, the one hard-hearted, close-fisted old Shylock so often found in rural districts; the one man within a radius of twenty miles who had made a fortune. He was reputedly worth seventy or eighty thousand dollars; possibly he was worth fifty thousand. But when that is divided into mortgages, ranging from two or three hundred dollars up to, perhaps, one or two of five thousand, one can realize what a power he was in the country side; how many heart-strings he had tangled in his grasping fingers; from how many couches his shadowy outstretched hand banished sleep; at how many tables his hollow, gaping palm was seen, as the children put out their hands for food; before how many hearths his spectral presence ever sat with a look of anticipatory proprietorship. He was as cruel as the grave, and as relentless as time. Not one ten minutes of grace did ever any one get from old Reilly. The children looked at him with awe as he drove past in his old-fashioned buggy, a hatchet-faced old man, thin, cold-blooded, with big knuckly hands holding the reins. Hen Braddon knew what he was doing when he referred to him. The week before, Hiram Green's brother had been turned neck and crop out of his farm by this same Reilly. No fear that Hiram would let him get another "haul" off old Sam if he could help it.

"That's so," said Hiram, with alacrity. "Andrew, you just make out the appointment, will you? and you post it, Hen, when you go home."

Andrew having gained his point, was generously sorry that he had twitted Hiram about the salary matter, so in the subsequent open meeting he let Hiram do all the talking, looking the while at a dark stain on the ceiling, which a coat of whitewash, put on yearly since he was a boy, had failed to obliterate. He would never forget how that ink went up, and that might be the very same old box stove over in the corner, the one upon which he set that tightly corked bottle of frozen ink to thaw, taking precaution at the same time to be out of the road when it exploded. It had been a particularly brilliant "go off" that—straight up to the ceiling and down in a shower of black spatters. Andrew could see the fun of it yet, and found himself involuntarily looking at his palms, as though some traces of the blisters the teacher's rawhide had raised might still be there. Andrew recalled many other such like exploits, and looked at his smooth, brown palms, thinking how many thorough thrashings he had had, when suddenly a line of poetry he had read some days before, came into his head:

"Lay thy sweet hands in mine, and trust to me."

He sat through the meeting quite oblivious of what was going on, missing what was one of the finest oratorical flights of Hiram Green's career. He was speaking of the departing teacher, and he made many scathing remarks anent the legends and pictures upon the walls, which, as he brilliantly put it, "indicated an entire and deplorable lack of discipline upon the part of the present teacher." The said teacher smiled and said nothing. Had Hiram looked closely at the pictures he would have found that a good many of the drawings were caricatures of himself and his family. In one rude picture the four Misses Green were represented as having hold of a man, who struggled in the midst. By means of certain facial peculiarities, exaggerated as only a genius or a school-boy would dare exaggerate, any one in Ovid could have identified the Misses Green and their victim, a former teacher. One of the ladies held a coat sleeve she had rent off; another a portion of a coat-tail; and over this group the artist had printed in fair round script, "For his garment they cast lots." Under the circumstances the applicability of this would have been a credit to Du Maurier, and be it said in defence of the school-boy artist, it was probably written with no thought of being impious. Your school-boy caricaturist catches the spirit of the times.

The participants in the school meeting were just departing from the school-house doors, when to them came old Sam Symmons. He had just been told by Suse of her application, and an almost stifling eagerness was filling his heart. If she got it, it meant so much: but he presented his usual suave, smiling old face to Hen Braddon and Hiram Green, and said nothing. As Andrew passed the old man looked at him. That look of age to green manhood, how pitiful it is! Andrew paused a moment. "We're going to have an Ovid teacher this time," he said. "You'll tell Suse, won't you, Mr. Symmons, that her appointment is in the mails?"

Poor old Sam! It was harder for him to carry off good fortune with nonchalance than it was to remain impassive in the face of bad. He had had so much more practice in the latter form of self-control. He drew his breath deeply, and his lips quivered a little. Andrew saw this.

"Don't forget to tell her, Mr. Symmons," he added, and went on his way.

Forget!

"Meeting over, Mr. Braddon? Meeting over?" Sam queried, falling into the irregular ranks of the moving men. "Well, well I remember the time your grandfather and I were school trustees, and he was a shoemaker, and a better man with lasts than letters. In his young days he used to go about from house to house making the shoes. He had regular places for calling; two pairs a year was the allowance—well, that custom has long gone by. Anyhow, we were both trustees, and one day we went out to the Beechwood School, section No. 6 now. Well, the minister was there, too, and Squire Harkness—both long dead now—brothers they were. One of the children handed up her slate for your grandfather to look at, and he, holding it in front of him at arm's length, said, with consideration seemingly to its merits, 'Fair, very fair,' which was right enough truly; but when your grandfather held it over to the rest of us, 'twas plain to be seen he had had the slate upside down. Yes, he was ambitious, too, your grandfather was, and got on well in the world; he even bought him a big silver watch. Watches weren't so plentiful in those days. You didn't get a watch in the pocket of every suit of clothes you bought then, as the papers would show you do now. And when we asked your grandfather what time it was, as we would frequently do, being minded to please him, he would take out his watch, look at it with consideration, and hold it out to us saying, 'Who'd ha' thought 'twas that time o' day,' in surprise seemingly, which was right smart, for he never learned to read time, your grandfather didn't. But a good business man he was, and a good neighbour, as many a poor body knew."

Old Sam and his following straggled in twos and threes up the street, past Bill Aikins' house, where Bill stood in the doorway smoking, having just helped his wife Kate, née Horne, hang up the day's washing, school meetings being in his wife's opinion too provocative of idleness, the idleness which the devil improves, to be indulged in by Bill.

Bill's house, albeit small, had a particularly aggressive look. It had a door in the centre, and a window with red-painted sash on either side. These windows always shone effulgently clean. Whether this brilliancy of pane or the vermilion paint produced the effect, it is difficult to say, but certain it is that Bill's house always looked as though it were about to spring on the road, which was, figuratively, much the same as the attitude of Bill's wife towards him.

Bill Aikins had originally been a boy brought out by one of the benevolent English societies, which gather up the scum of their own cities and trust to the more sparkling atmosphere of the New World to aerate it into "respectable and useful citizens." Bill Aikins had taken French leave of the minister with whom the Horne had placed him. A plenitude of prayers and a paucity of what Bill had called "hot wittles," decided him upon this step. He wandered to Ovid, and for many years had been "hired man" to the various farmers within ten miles of the village. He was a good worker, but lacked ballast, and was rapidly degenerating into a sot when Kate Horne married him, and, as the boys expressed it, "brought him up standing."

The men greeted Bill pleasantly, and Bill responded genially, trying to look as if he was unconscious of Kate's criticisms upon the men passing—a somewhat difficult thing to accomplish, as Kate spoke so loudly from the room behind that her remarks were perfectly audible to the subjects of them.

One by one the crowd dwindled away, and then old Sam "putting his best foot foremost," as he would have said, hurried home and told Suse of her good fortune. She was very elated, was Suse, and kept murmuring to herself, "I'll just show them Greens what's what."

* * * * * *

Long after the last light had twinkled out in the village, a shaft of light streamed across the old garden of the house on the hill. For all the calm of Andrew's heart was gone. The peace of the first acceptance of the fact that he loved this stranger girl had vanished. He got down on his knees, reached under the bed and pulled out an old, old-fashioned little chest, covered with untanned cowhide, whose brown and white patches were studded with rows of big brass nails. It held the books over which his mother's pretty dark head had bent so often, close by that other proud one, which soon lay humbly enough in its kindred dust. It was no unusual thing for Andrew to spend half the night poring over these books. There was a fat little copy of Shakespeare, with ruinously small print; a quaint little leather volume of Francis Quarles, George Herbert's poetry; Suckling's and a subscription copy of the Queen's Wake, "dedicated to the Princess Charlotte by a shepherd in the Highlands of Scotland." These, with a few others, had formed his mother's library. Getting them out, he looked for certain passages he knew well—passages that had wrung his heart before this with their description of unattainable sweetness and love—passages that had almost made him despair, and yet, not wholly, for he had dreamed a dream of one day going forth to seek and find a Beatrice, a Juliet, a Desdemona, a Rosalind—all in one divine combination of womanhood, worthy to have been addressed in the immortal sonnets. And, lo! the spring had brought her—would the summer give her to him? The kindly summer that gives the flower to the bee, the sun to the flower, the blue sky to the sun, and all the earth to joy. Surely—and but a mile away Judith slept, dreaming, but not of song. And over the waters that quickened with insect life, through the air all astir with the scents and savours of spring, athwart the earth that was quivering with the growth of all things green—summer came one day nearer.