y not find hit right easy for to trap him. I'll
promise ef he does come up hyer again I'll speak a good word for you,
Jude. The Lord knows I don't see how you make out to live with that thar
old man. You'll deserve a crown and a harp o' gold sot with diamonds ef
you stan' it much longer."

Judith put on the now thoroughly dried riding-skirt, and the two women
went outside together.

"Well, good-bye, Aunt Nancy," she said, as she led the sorrel nag to the
edge of the porch and made ready to mount. "I'll be over and bring the
pieces for you to start me out on that Risin' Sun quilt a-Wednesday."

It was late afternoon as she took her homeward way across the level of
the broad mountain-top to the Turrentine place. She left the
main-travelled road and struck directly into a forest short-cut. After
the rain earth and sky were newly washed; the clear, sweetened air was
full of the scent of damp loam and new-ploughed fields; the colours about
her were freshened and glad, and each distant bird-note rang clear and
vivid. To Mrs. Rhody Staggart and her likes at Hepzibah she might be a
crude, awkward country girl; here she was a princess in her own domain;
and it was a noble realm through which she moved as she went forward
under the great trees that rose straight and tall from a black soil,
making pillared aisles away from her on every side. The fern was thick
under foot--it would brush her saddle-girth, come midsummer. Down the
long vistas under the greening trees, where the moist air hung thick, her
bemused eyes caught the occasional roseflash of azalea through the pearly
mist, her nostril was greeted by their wandering, intensely sweet
perfume, with its curious undernote of earth smell.

She smiled vaguely at the first butterfly she had seen, and again as she
noted the earliest lizard basking in the sun-warmed hollow of a big rock.
Absently her gaze sought for cinnamon fern in low woods, sweet fern in
the thickets, and exquisite maidenhair just beginning to uncurl from the
black leaf mould of dripping brakes.

Like a woman in a dream she made her progress, riding through the
wonderful stillness of the vast wild land, an ocean on which each
littlest sound was afloat, so that each was given its true value almost
like a musical tone. An awful, beautiful silence this, brooding back of
every sound; nothing in such a place gives forth mere senseless noise;
the ripple of frogs in marsh and spring branch fall upon the sense as
swe