shipful a divinity. She
sought vaguely to conjecture just what his words would be when next they
spoke together. Her lips formed themselves into tender, reminiscent
half-smiles as she went over the few and brief moments of her three
interviews with Stoddard.

Johnnie was not inexperienced in matters of the heart. Mating time comes
early in the mountains. Had her dreams been of Shade Buckheath, or any
of the boys of her own kind and class, she would have been instantly
full of self-consciousness; but Gray Stoddard appeared to her a creature
so apart from her sphere that this overwhelming attraction he held for
her seemed no more than the admiration she might have given to Miss
Lydia Sessions. And so the dream lay undisturbed under her eyelashes,
and she breasted the slope of the big mountain with a buoyant step,
oblivious of fatigue.

She reached the little wayside spring before even the early-rising
mountain folk were abroad, found three pink blossoms in full perfection,
plucked them and wrapped them carefully in damp cloths disposed in a
little hickory basket that Uncle Pros had made for her years ago. It was
a tiny thing, designed to hold a child's play-pretties or a young girl's
sewing, but shaped and fashioned after the manner of mountain baskets,
and woven of stout white hickory withes shaved down to daintier size and
pliancy by the old man's jack-knife. Life was very sweet to Johnnie
Consadine as she straightened up, basket in hand, and turned toward the
home journey.

It was nearly nine o'clock when she reached the gap above Cottonville.
She was singing a little, softly, to herself, as she footed it down the
road, and wishing that she might see Gray's face when he got her
flowers. She planned to put them in a glass on his desk Monday morning,
and of course she would be at her loom long before he should reach the
office. She was glad they were such fine specimens--all perfect.
Lovingly she pulled aside the wet cloth and looked in at them. She began
to meet people on the road, and the cabins she passed were open and
thronged with morning life. The next turn in the road would bring her to
the spring where she had rested that evening just a week ago, and where
Shade had met her.

Suddenly, she caught the sheen of something down the road between the
scant greenery. It was a carriage or an automobile. Now, it was more
likely to be the former than the latter; also, there were a half-dozen
cars in Cottonville; yet f