"Now, if this earthly love has power to make
Men's being mortal, immortal; to shake
Ambitions from their memories, and brim
Their measure of content: what merest whim
Seems all this poor endeavour after fame."
One day Judith, who had been in the village, went up to see Miss Myers. It was intensely warm. To the eye the air seemed to quiver with heat; a brazen sun shone in a cloudless sky; the birds were still; nature was dumb; the only sounds which broke the stillness were echoes of enforced toil. As Judith walked along the lanes, now grown deep in grass, the fragrance of over-ripe clover came to her in waves of satiating sweetness. The birds she startled uttered no cry, but flew heavily to some near perch and sat there languidly, with feathers ruffled on their little heads, their tiny bills apart as if they gasped for breath, their wings drooping loosely with parted feathers at their sides.
When she reached the house on the hill, she went straight through the hall to the kitchen, for she had long ago been given the liberty of the house.
Miss Myers bustled up with grim kindness, took away her hat, made her sit by the window, and brought her a great cool goblet of raspberry syrup in water. It was very cool in this big kitchen. The windows were heavily hung with Virginian Creeper, and the stove was in the summer kitchen. Rufus lay stretched in one corner, his ears flapping as he snatched irascibly at a tormenting fly.
Miss Myers had been a little upset when Judith entered, and she proceeded to tell Judith her worries. She had come out to inspect the kitchen work, and found her milk pans set out without their bunches of grass.
"A silly notion of Sarah Myers," the Ovid women called it, but it was a dainty one nevertheless—one Miss Myers' mother and mother's mother had always observed, since ever the first Myers left the meadows of Devon. This notion was that all summer long Miss Myers insisted that the polished milk pans, when set out to sweeten in the sun, should each have a bunch of fresh grass or clover put in it, to wither in the pan. She declared it gave sweetness and flavour to the milk.
Miss Myers had many dainty ways in her house-keeping. The glossy linen sheets were laid away with clusters of sweet clover in their folds. Her snowy blankets were packed with cedar sprigs. Her table linen was fragrant all summer with the stolen perfume of violets or rose leaves strewn with them in the linen drawer. And in the winter there were twigs of lemon thyme and lemon verbena there, carefully dried for that purpose. "All notions," the villagers said contemptuously, adding something about old maids. Nevertheless, these notions savoured the whole household with sweetness, and seemed to add beauty to the more prosaic details of every-day work.
Since Judith had come so frequently to the house, there had always been flowers upon the dining table and in the parlour, and in the big dim bedroom.
Hot as it was, Miss Myers was ready to go out and patrol the garden, which, subdued beneath the sun's caresses, lay exhaling a hundred varied scents. The tall white lilies were in bloom at last, ineffably lovely, with golden hearts and petals whose edges were silvery in the sunshine.
When Andrew returned at night from his fields, his strong face a little weary, his eyes restless and eager, the first sight that met his vision was Judith Moore,—Judith, in a simple dark blue frock, standing in the doorway of his home, and looking—he dared hope—for him. She looked so consonant with the old house and the flowerful garden that Andrew felt no other presence in the world would have completed the picture so well.