e rail fence
drew the line of demarkation, Art seemed to fail.

A crude wash of ochre had apparently sufficed for the dooryard; no
weed grew here, no twig. It was tramped firm and hard by the feet of
cow, and horse, and the peripatetic children, and poultry. The cabin
was drawn in with careless angles and lines by a mere stroke or two;
and surely no painter, no builder save the utilitarian backwoodsman,
would have left it with no relief of trees behind it, no vineyard, no
garden, no orchard, no background, naught; in its gaunt simplicity and
ugliness it stood against its own ill-tended fields flattening away in
the rear.

Such as it was, however, it satisfied all of Justus Hoxon's sense of
the appropriate and the picturesque when Theodosia Blakely stepped out
from the door and came slowly to meet him. The painter's art, if she
were to be esteemed part of the foreground, might have seemed redeemed
in her. Her dress was of light blue homespun; her sunbonnet of deep
red calico, pushed back, showed her dark brown hair waving upward in
heavy undulations from her brow, her large blue eyes with their thick
black lashes, her rich brunette complexion, her delicate red lips cut
in fine lines, and the gleam of her teeth as she smiled. She had a
string of opaque white, wax-like beads around the neck of her dress,
and the contrast of the pearly whiteness of the bauble with the creamy
whiteness and softness of her throat was marked with much finish. Her
figure was hardly of medium height, and, despite the suppleness of
youth, as "plump as a partridge," according to the familiar saying.
The clear iris of her eyes gave an impression of quick shifting, and
by them one could see her mood change as she approached.

She looked at him intently, speculatively, a sort of doubtful
curiosity furtively suggested in her expression; but there was naught
subtle or covert in the gaze that met hers--naught but the frankest
pleasure and happiness. He did not move, as she advanced, nor offer
formal greeting; he only smiled, secure, content, restful, as she came
up and sat down on the end of the bench. The children, playing noisily
in the back yard on the wood-pile, paused for a moment to gaze with
callow interest at them; but the spectacle of "The'dosia's sweetheart"
was too familiar to be of more than fleeting diversion, and they
resorted once more to their pastime. Mrs. Blakely too, who with
rolling-pin in her hand had turned to gaze out of the wi