ch was but its own
self in other guise.

Day by day she turned from side to side for an exit from the fiery path
she trod, and cried out to Heaven that she could not bear it--she could
not stand it--there must be some way other than this!

The Lusk girls and the Turrentine twins were to have a double wedding.
The preparations for this event were torture to Judith. Everybody, it
seemed, could be happy but her own poor self. Even the fact that Jeff and
Andy were changed, kinder to her, more considerate, better men in every
way, had its own sting. If this could have been so before, the wreck of
her world need not have come about.

Blatch kept rigorously to his own side of the Gulch, yet once in a while
Judith met him on the highroad; and then, while he approached her with
the carefullest efforts toward pleasing, he showed the effects of
anxiety, the hard life, and the fact that he had begun to drink
heavily--a thing he had never done before.

Spring would terminate his lease of the Turrentine farm, and then he must
seek other quarters for his illicit traffic. His situation was doubled in
danger by the fact that it could not be disguised how his uncle had
turned upon him. Now that one did not, supposably, incur the displeasure
of the Turrentines by giving information concerning Blatch and his still,
the enterprise was a much safer one, and he trembled in hourly terror of
its being undertaken by some needy soul. This terror gave a certain
ferocity to his manner. Also the man who had come in with him to take Jim
Cal's place in the partnership was a more undesirable associate even than
Buck Shalliday.

Judith watched all these things with an idle lack of interest that was
strangely foreign to her vivid human temperament. As time passed and she
could hear nothing from Creed Bonbright, nor of him beyond what Blatch
had told her, and the connection she made between it and Iley's report of
Huldah's marriage, the inaction of her woman's lot was almost more than
she could endure. Of an evening after her milking was over she would
stand at the draw-bars under the wide, blue, twilight sky, and stare with
her great, black, passionate eyes into the autumn dusk, and her whole
being went forth with such an intensity of longing that it seemed some
part of it must find Creed, wherever he was, and speak for her to him.

After Iley's announcement in September Judith never approached her nor
talked to her again, though the shrew was grow