"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.