g; reversed his
position; slept again. The young corn, deep green in the bottomland,
moved with a staccato flurry, and the dust ghost of a mad whirling
dervish sped up the main road to vanish at the bridge in a climax of
lunacy. The stirring air brought a smell of blossoms; the distance took
on faint lavender hazes which blended the outlines of the fields, lying
like square coverlets upon the long slope of rising ground beyond the
bottom-land, and empurpled the blue woodland shadows of the groves.

For the first time, it struck Joe that it was a beautiful day, and it
came to him that a beautiful day was a thing which nothing except
death, sickness, or imprisonment could take from him--not even the ban
of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did
not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he
left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of
"the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with
the sweetness of it.

"Go ahead!" he whispered. "Do that all you want to. If you'll keep it
up like this awhile, I'll follow with 'Little Brown Jug, How I Love
Thee!' It seems to pay, after all!"

The welcome strains, however, were but the prelude to a harsher sound
which interrupted and annihilated them: the Court-house bell clanging
out twelve. "All right," said Joe. "It's noon and I'm 'across Main
Street bridge.'"

He opened his eyes and looked about him whimsically. Then he shook his
head again.

A lady had just emerged from the bridge and was coming toward him.

It would be hard to get at Joe's first impressions of her. We can find
conveyance for only the broadest and heaviest. Ancient and modern
instances multiply the case of the sleeper who dreams out a long story
in accurate color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and
shutting of a door. So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady's
approach. And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been--in
fact it was, in his recollections, later--a blur of emotion.

At first sight of her, perhaps it was pre-eminently the shock of seeing
anything so exquisite where he had expected to see nothing at all. For
she was exquisite--horrid as have been the uses of the word, its best
and truest belong to her; she was that and much more, from the ivory
ferrule of the parasol she carried, to the light and slender footprint
she left in the dust of the road. Joe knew at