on a day, that the familiar companion who has grown up
beside each has changed into quite a different person.

She rolled the trundle-bed back into place and turned to lift a pile of
bedding that lay apparently on a chest. When it was raised it revealed
the clumsy old cradle that had rocked three generations of Bonbrights.
She stood looking down at it with quickening pulse, then reached a
fluttering hand and touched its small pillow tenderly. Here had rested
that golden head, so many years ago; beside it his mother had sat and
rocked. At the thought Judith was on her knees, her hands falling
naturally upon the side and rocking the small bed. In a strange conflict
of dreamy emotion, she swayed it back and forth a moment, and then--what
woman could resist it?--began to croon an old mountain cradle song.
Suddenly the westering sun got to the level of a half shrouded window and
sent a beam in across Judith's bent head.

"My land!" she whispered, getting to her feet. "I ain't got no call to
stay foolin' here all day. Dilsey'll jest about burn them cakes I told
her to bake, and I ain't fixed my blue bow for my hair yet."

She swept a glance around the speckless room, gathered up her
paraphernalia of cleaning, passed out, locked the door, and set her face
toward home.

In Mary Bonbright's garden, now given over to weeds as the gardens of
dead women are so apt to be, there had grown a singular, half wild rose.
This flower was of a clear blood red, with a yellow heart which its five
broad petals, flinging wide open, disclosed to view, unlike the crimped
and guarded loveliness of the more evolved sisters of the green-house.
Mowed down spring after spring by the scythe of Strubley, the renter, the
vigorous thing had spread abroad, and as Judith stepped from the door its
exultant beauty caught her eye. Flaming shields of crimson, bearing each
its boss of filagree gold, the hosts of the red rose stood up bravely in
the choking grass to which the insensate scythe blade had so often
levelled them, and shouted to the girl of love and joy, and of youth
which was the time for both. Wide petalled, burning red, their golden
hearts open to sun and bee, they were the blossoms for the earth-woman.
She ran and knelt down beside them.

He had said that his favourite colour was blue--but there are no blue
roses. She did not follow it far enough to guess that the man who was
content with the colour of the sky might not get his gaze down close