up on them steps when he
begun. I don't believe he needs as much takin' care of as we think."

"Wasn't it one of them Cross-Roads devils that knocked his hat off?"
asked Judd Bennett. "I thought I see Bob Skillett run up with a club."

Harkless threw open the doors behind him; the hall was empty. "You may
come in now," he said. "This isn't my court-house."

CHAPTER VIII. GLAD AFTERNOON: THE GIRL BY THE BLUE TENT-POLE

They walked slowly back along the pike toward the brick house. The
white-ruffed fennel reached up its dusty yellow heads to touch her
skirts as she passed, and then drooped, satisfied, against the purple
iron-weed at the roadside. In the noonday silence no cricket chirped nor
locust raised its lorn monotone; the tree shadows mottled the road with
blue, and the level fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath, the
transparent "heat-waves" that danced above the low corn and green wheat.

He was stooping very much as they walked; he wanted to be told that
he could look at her for a thousand years. Her face was rarely and
exquisitely modelled, but, perhaps, just now the salient characteristic
of her beauty (for the salient characteristic seemed to be a different
thing at different times) was the coloring, a delicate glow under the
white skin, that bewitched him in its seeming a reflection of the rich
benediction of the noonday sun that blazed overhead.

Once he had thought the way to the Briscoe homestead rather a long walk;
but now the distance sped malignantly; and strolled they never so
slow, it was less than a "young bird's flutter from a wood." With her
acquiescence he rolled a cigarette, and she began to hum lightly the air
of a song, a song of an ineffably gentle, slow movement.

That, and a reference of the morning, and, perhaps, the smell of his
tobacco mingling with the fragrance of her roses, awoke again the keen
reminiscence of the previous night within him. Clearly outlined before
him rose the high, green slopes and cool cliff-walls of the coast of
Maine, while his old self lazily watched the sharp little waves through
half-closed lids, the pale smoke of his cigarette blowing out under the
rail of a waxen deck where he lay cushioned. And again a woman pelted
his face with handfuls of rose-petals and cried: "Up lad and at 'em!
Yonder is Winter Harbor." Again he sat in the oak-raftered Casino,
breathless with pleasure, and heard a young girl sing the "Angel's
Serenade," a young girl wh