he great occasion, the
first meeting with Creed found Judith unprepared, happening in no wise as
she would have chosen. She was at the milking lot, clad in the usual dull
blue cotton gown in which the mountain woman works. She had filled her
two pails and set them on the high bench by the fence while she turned
the calves into the small pasture reserved for them and let old Red and
Piedy out.

He approached across the fields from the direction of his own house, and
naturally saw her before she observed him. It was early morning. The sky
was blue and wide and high, with great shining piles of white cloud
swimming lazily at the horizon, cutting sharply against its colour.
Around the edges of the cow-lot peach trees were all in blossom and
humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay
April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the
promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous
warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning
insects, over a plum thicket near the woods,--half-wild, brambly things,
cousin on the one hand to the cultivated farm, and on the other to the
free forest,--while beyond, through the openings of the timber, dogwood
flamed white in the sun.

Judith came forward and greeted the newcomer, all unaware of the picture
she made, tall and straight and pliant in her simple blue cotton, under
the wonderful blue-and-white sky and the passionate purple pink of the
blossoms, with the scant folds of her frock outlining the rounded young
body, its sleeves rolled up on her fine arms, its neck folded away from
the firm column of her throat, the frolic wind ruffling the dark locks
above her shadowy eyes. There were strange gleams in those dark eyes; her
red lips were tremulous whether she spoke or not. It was as though she
had some urgent message for him which waited always behind her silence or
her speech.

"I thought I'd come over and get acquainted with my neighbours,"
Bonbright began in his impersonal fashion.

"Uncle Jep and the boys has gone across to the far place ploughing
to-day," said Judith. "They's nobody at home but Jim Cal and his
wife--and me." She forebore to add the name of Huldah Spiller, though her
angry eye descried that young woman ostentatiously hanging wash on a line
back of the Jim Cal cabin.

"I won't stop then this morning," said Bonbright. "I'll get along over to
the far place. I wanted to