As she was about to answer the door creaked above them and Mrs. Berry came down the short flight of steps, hastily fastening her calico dress as she descended.
"Well, I declare, who'd have thought to see you at this hour, Miss Emily," she exclaimed effusively.
"I thought you might need the milk early," replied the girl, "and as Micah had an attack of rheumatism I brought it over on horseback."
While the old woman emptied the contents of the can into a cracked china pitcher, Emily held out her hand to Ordway with an impulsive gesture.
"We shall have a flourishing kitchen garden," she said, "thanks to you."
Then taking the empty can from Mrs. Berry, she crossed the threshold, and remounted from the doorstep.
CHAPTER XII
A String Of Coral
AS Emily rode slowly up from Bullfinch's Hollow, it seemed to her that the abandoned fields had borrowed an aspect which was almost one of sentiment. In the golden light of the sunrise even the Negro hovels, the refuse heaps and the dead thistles by the roadside, were transfigured until they appeared to lose their ordinary daytime ugliness; and the same golden light was shining inwardly on the swift impressions which crowded her thoughts. This strange inner illumination surrounded, she discovered now, each common fact which presented itself to her mind, and though the outward form of life was not changed, her mental vision had become suddenly enraptured. She did not stop to ask herself why the familiar events of every day appear so full of vivid interests—why the external objects at which she looked swam before her gaze in an atmosphere that was like a rainbow mist? It was sufficient to be alive to the finger tips, and to realise that everything in the great universe was alive around one—the air, the sky, the thistles along the roadside and the dust blowing before the wind, all moved, she felt, in harmony with the elemental pulse of life. On that morning she entered for the first time into the secret of immortality.
And yet—was it only the early morning hour? she asked herself, as she rode back between the stretches of dried broomsedge. Or was it, she questioned a moment later, the natural gratification she had felt in a charity so generous, so unassuming as that of the man she had seen at Mrs. Berry's?
"It's a pity he isn't a gentleman and that his clothes are so rough," she thought, and blushed the next instant with shame because she was "only a wretched snob."