et the red curls
out of her eyes. "Well, Iley had give me fifty cents on my wages--"
Huldah worked as a servant in her sister's family, which is not uncommon
in the mountains--"an' I tuck it and bought me ten yard of five-cent
lawn, the prettiest blue you ever put yo' eyes on."

"Blue!" A sudden shock went over Judith. She had forgotten; and here
Huldah Spiller would wear a blue dress, and she--oh, the stupidity, the
bat-like, doltish, blindness of it!--would be in white, because it was
now too late to make a change. Out of the very tragedy of the situation
she managed to pluck forth a smile.

"I was aimin' to wear blue ribbons," she said finally. It had just come
into her head that she could pull the blue bow from her hat--that blue
bow with which she had zealously replaced the despised and outcast
red--and so make shift.

"Blue's my best feller's favourite colour," contributed Huldah, picking
up the bucket which she had set down, and starting on. "He 'lows it goes
fine with aurbu'n hair."

"Wade never said that," muttered Judith to herself as she took her way to
the Bonbright place.

But after all one could not be long out of tune with such a summer day.
The spicy odour of pennyroyal bruised underfoot, came to her nostrils
like incense. Even the sickly sweet of jimson blossoms by the draw-bars
of the milking lot was dear and familiar, while their white trumpets
whispered of childish play-days and flower-ladies she had set walking in
procession under the shadow of some big green leaf. Blue--the soft stars
of spider-wort opening among the rocks reminded her of the hue; blue
curls and dittany tangled at the path edge; but the very air itself was
beginning to wear Creed's colour and put on that wonderful, luminous blue
in which the Cumberlands of midsummer melt cerulean into a sky of lapis
lazuli. Creed's colour--Creed's colour--her dark eyes misted as they
searched the far reaches of the hills and found it everywhere.

Jephthah Turrentine used to say that if a man owned enough mountain land
to set his foot on, he owned the whole of the sky above him; it was a
truer word than this old mountain dweller could have known, since the
mere possessor of a city lot, where other tall roofs cut the horizon
high, must content himself with less of the welkin.

Judith opened the door, went in, closed it behind her, and gazed about.
There lay over everything a fine dust; there was the look of decay which
comes with disuse; and