once that nothing like
her had ever before been seen in Canaan.

He had little knowledge of the millinery arts, and he needed none to
see the harmony--harmony like that of the day he had discovered a
little while ago. Her dress and hat and gloves and parasol showed a
pale lavender overtint like that which he had seen overspreading the
western slope. (Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that
day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The
charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to
her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the
expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it. She was tall, but
if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have
been capable of calling her lips "red," in which case he would not have
been Joe, and would have been as far from the truth as her lips were
from red, or as her supreme delicateness was from mere slenderness.

Under the summer hat her very dark hair swept back over her temples
with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld
from being fluffy. It may be that this approach to trimness, which
was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key
to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe. Let us
say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the
hint of floridity was abhorrent to her. "Trim" is as clumsy as
"slender"; she had escaped from the trimness of girlhood as wholly as
she had gone through its coltishness. "Exquisite." Let us go back to
Joe's own blurred first thought of her and be content with that!

She was to pass him--so he thought--and as she drew nearer, his breath
came faster.

"REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!" Was THIS the fay of
whom the voice had warned him? With that, there befell him the mystery
of last night. He did not remember, but it was as if he lived again,
dimly, the highest hour of happiness in a life a thousand years ago;
perfume and music, roses, nightingales and plucked harp-strings. Yes;
something wonderful was happening to him.

She had stopped directly in front of him; stopped and stood looking at
him with her clear eyes. He did not lift his own to hers; he had long
experience of the averted gaze of women; but it was not only that; a
great shyness beset him. He had risen and removed his hat, trying
(ineffectually) not to clear his throat; his every-day s