m and
pushed back a straying lock of hair.

Joe's tongue lay cold, and numb as wood against his palate; no word
would come to it; it would not move. The wonder of a new beauty in God's
created things was deep upon him; a warm fountain rose in him and played
and tossed, with a new and pleasurable thrill. He saw and admired, but
he was not ashamed.

All that he had come to say to her was forgotten, all that he had framed
to speak as he bore hastily on toward the house had evaporated from his
heated brain. A new world turned its bright colors before his eyes, a
new breadth of life had been revealed, it seemed to him. In the pleasure
of his discovery he stood with no power in him but to tremble and
stare.

The flush deepened in Ollie's cheeks. She understood what was moving in
his breast, for it is given to her kind to know man before he knows
himself. She feigned surprise to behold him thus stricken, staring and
silent, his face scarlet with the surge of his hot blood.

With one slow-lifted hand she gathered the edges of her dress together,
withdrawing the revealed secret of her breast.

"Why, Joe! What are you looking at?" she asked.

"You," he answered, his voice dry and hoarse, like that of one who asks
for water at the end of a race. He turned away from her then, saying no
more, and passed quickly out of her sight beyond the shrubbery which
shouldered the kitchen wall.

Slowly Ollie lifted the dasher which had settled to the bottom of the
churn, and a smile broke upon her lips. As she went on with the
completion of her task, she smiled still, with lips, with eyes, with
warm exultation of her strong young body, as over a triumphant ending of
some issue long at balance and undefined.

Joe went away from the kitchen door in a strange daze of faculties. For
that new feeling which leaped in him and warmed him to the core, and
gave him confidence in his strength never before enjoyed, and an
understanding of things hitherto unrevealed, he was glad. But at heart
he felt that he was a traitor to the trust imposed in him, and that he
had violated the sanctity of his master's home.

Now he knew what it was that had made his cheeks flame in anger and his
blood leap in resentment when he saw Ollie in the door that morning, all
flushed and trembling from Morgan's arms; now he understood why he had
lingered to interpose between them in past days. It was the wild, deep
fear of jealousy. He was in love with his master's wife