backed speller when I was a boy. I mind writin' em out big an' plain
after the teacher's copy."

Creed looked about him for Judith. He had failed with the old man, but
she would understand--she would know. His hungry heart counselled him
that she was his best friend, and he glanced wistfully at the door
through which she had vanished; but it remained obstinately closed as he
made his farewells, got dispiritedly to his mule and away.

Judith watched his departure from an upper window, smitten to the heart
by the drooping lines of the figure, the bend of the yellow head.
Inexorably drawn she came down the steep stairs, checking, halting at
every step, her breast heaving with the swift alternations of her mood.
The door of the boys' room swung wide; her swift glance descried Wade's
figure just vanishing into the grove at the edge of the clearing.

The tall, gaunt old man brooded in his chair, his black eyes fixed on
vacancy, the pipe in his relaxed fingers dropped to his knee. Up toward
the Jim Cal cabin Iley, one baby on her hip and two others clinging to
her skirts, dodged behind a convenient smoke-house, and peered out
anxiously.

Judith stepped noiselessly into the porch; the old man did not turn his
head. Her quick eye noted the paper Creed had dropped. She stooped and
picked it up unobserved, slipped into the kitchen, studying its lines of
figures which meant nothing to her, caught up her sunbonnet and, glancing
warily about, made an exit through the back door. She ran through a long
grape-arbour where great wreathing arms of Virgin's Bower aided to shut
the green tunnel in from sight, then took a path where tall bushes
screened her, making for the short cut which she guessed Creed would
take.

Down the little dell through which she herself had ridden that first day
with what wonderful thoughts of him in her heart, she got sight of him,
going slowly, the lagging gait of the old mule seeming to speak his own
depression. The trees were all vigorous young second growth here, and
curtained the slopes with billows of green. The drying ground sent up a
spicy mingling of odours--decaying pine needles, heart leaf, wintergreen
berries, and the very soil itself.

Bumblebees shouldered each other clumsily about the heads of milk-weed
blossoms. Cicada droned in long, loud crescendo and diminuendo under the
hot sun of mid forenoon. A sensitive plant, or as Judith herself would
have said, a "shame briar," caught at her skirt