How sweet to see a woman waiting there for him! Even as he had dreamed. He stood some time and watched her, himself unobserved. How sweet and calm her face was—yet anticipative, content—yet eager! He looked at her long across the narrow space from where he stood, and in after days recalled her untroubled beauty very clearly.
He tried to note in detail the form of her features, but he could only think of her faithful eyes, the beauty of her honest smile, the promise of her mouth, with the deep hollow between the lower lip and the dimpled hillock of her chin, which is, they say, the truest indication of a woman's capacity for real love, just as heavy eyelids denote modesty, and thin nostrils delicacy of the senses.
Some sympathy, some subtle mental influence, made Judith flush and look about her. Andrew slipped around the corner of the house, to come behind her in a few minutes rid of the day's dust. He touched her gently on the shoulder. She started, yet laughed. "I knew you were coming," she said; "I did not hear you, but I was certain of it."
After tea, they three (for Judith felt shy of Andrew to-night, and clung to Miss Myers, and gently compelled her to step forth with them) walked up and down the garden walks.
The flowers, their fragrance freshened by the dew, flung forth their odours royally. The birds, revived by the coolness, were singing their deferred songs. An oriole's liquid note was answered from the lindens; the robins were flying about from tree to tree with happy confidence; some Phoebe birds were fluttering about the porch; sparrows were wrangling in the box; a humming-bird was darting from bed to bed; emerald-throated, ruby-crested, it vibrated from flower to flower, itself like an animated vagrant blossom; the swallows were darting in long, graceful flights high in air, or soaring in slanting circles over the barns, where their nests were; now and then, flying slowly homeward, a crow crossed their vision, a shadow on the sky.
The heavy toads hopped lumberingly forth from their hiding-places to search for slugs; a tree toad gave its shrill call from a cedar tree. Andrew had once shown Judith one, clinging like a lichen to the bark, and of much the same greyish-green colour. The crickets sang shrilly and sweetly, like boy sopranos in a vestured choir; the frogs, in a far-off pond, added their unfinished notes to Nature's vespers; bats flew silently and weirdly overhead.
"Do you know what the frogs say?" asked Andrew of Judith.
"No; what?" she asked, looking up so eagerly, so trustingly, that a smile twitched the corners of his mouth, even as he longed to gather her in his arms.
"The little frogs with the shrill voices say, 'Cut across! cut across! cut across!' The wise old frogs, the big ones, with the bass voices, say, 'Go round! go round! go round!'"
Judith listened, her eyes big with interest. "Why, so they do," she said, and looked at him as at a wizard revealing a mystery.