n always is. By its dim illumination
Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling
at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To
that challenge the native man in him--the lover--so long usurped by the
zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered
and uncertain, to respond. Something heady and ancient and eternally
young seemed to pass into his soul out of the night and the moonlight and
the shining of her eyes. He was all alive to her nearness, her
loveliness, to the sweet sense that she was a young woman, he a young
man, and the loveliness and the dearness of her were his for the
trying--for the winning. His breath caught in his throat.

"Wait a minute," he whispered hurriedly, though she had not moved. With
eager hands he wrapped the coat close about her. "Let's sit here on the
doorstep and talk awhile. There are a heap of things I want to ask you
about--that I want to tell you."

Young beauty and belle that she was, Judith had been sought and courted,
in that most primitive society, since she was fourteen. She was love's
votary by birthright, and her wit and her emotions were schooled in
love's game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in
each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should
be made love's final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague
altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught
him the ways of courtship.

Fire-flies sparkled everywhere, thickest over the marshy places. A mole
cricket was chirring in the grass by the old doorstone. Sharp on the soft
dark air came the call of that woodland night bird which the mountain
people say cries "chip-out-o'-white-oak," and which others translate
"chuck-wills-widow."

"I--" he began, hesitated momentarily, then daunted, grasped at the
familiar things of his life--"I don't get on very well up here. I'm
afraid I've made a failure of it; but"--he turned to her in a curious,
groping entreaty, his hat in his hands, the dim moonlight full on his
fair head and in his eager eyes--"but if you would help me--with you--I
think I ought to----"

"I say made a failure!" cooed Judith in her rich, low tones. "You ax me
whatever you want to know. You tell me what it is that you're aimin' to
do--I say made a failure!"

Her trust was so hearty, so wholesale, she filled so instantly the
position not only of sweetheart but o