Behind them the play was resumed in the lighted room; the whining of the fiddle, the thud and stamp of many feet, came to them softened and refined by a little distance. They were suddenly drawn together in that intimacy of two who leave the company and the lights on a special expedition. Judith made an impatient mental effort to release the incident of Huldah and the kiss, which had so unreasonably irritated her.

“If we was to go acrosst fields hit would be a heap better,” she advised softly, and they moved through the odorous, myriad-voiced darkness of the midsummer night, side by side, without speech, for a time. Then as Creed halted at a dim, straggling barrier which crossed their course and laid down a rail fence partially that she might the more easily get over in her white frock, she returned to the tormenting subject once more, opening obliquely:

“You and Huldy Spiller is old friends I reckon. Don’t you think she’s a powerful pretty girl?”

“Mighty pretty,” echoed Creed absently. All girls were of an even prettiness to him, and Huldah Spiller was a pleasant little thing. He was wondering what he had done back there in the play-room that had set them all against him.

“Her and Wade is goin’ to be wedded come September,” put in Judith jealously.

“Yo’ cousin will be getting a mighty fine wife.”

The mountain man is apt to make his comments on the marriages of his friends with dignified formality, and Creed uttered the accustomed phrase without heat or enthusiasm; but it seemed to Judith that he might have said less—or more.

“Well, I never did like red hair,” the girl managed to get out finally; “but I reckon hit’s better than old black stuff like mine.”

“My mother’s hair was sorter sandy,” Creed answered in his gentle, tolerant fashion. “Mine favours it.” And he had not the wit to add that dark hair, however, pleased him best.

Judith stepped beside him for some moments in mortified silence. Evidently he was green wood and could by none of her old methods be kindled. Then, their eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, they came out into a modified twilight in the clearing about the Bonbright house. “You better unlock the door and go in first,” suggested Judith, in a depressed tone.

“Why, I ain’t got the key,” Creed reminded her. “I left it with you—didn’t you bring it?”

They drew unconsciously close together in the dark with something of the guilty consternation of childish culprits. A mishap of the sort ripens an acquaintance swiftly.

“What a gump I was!” Judith breathed with sudden low laughter. He could see her eyes shining in the gloom, and the dim outline of her figure. “I knowed well an’ good you didn’t have the key—hit’s in the blue bowl on the fire-board at home.”

“I ought to have thought of it,” asserted Creed shouldering the blame. “And I’m sorry; I wanted to show you my mother’s picture.”

“An’ I’m sorry,” echoed Judith, remembering fleetingly the swept and garnished rooms, the wreath of red roses; “I had something to show you, too.”

Nothing was said of the dishes for the merrymakers at Judith’s house. Another interest was obtruding itself into the simple, practical expedition, crowding aside its original purpose. The girl looked around the dim, weed-grown garden, its bushes blots of deeper shadow upon the darkness, its blossoms vaguely conjectured by their odour.

“There used to be a bubby bush—a sweet-scented shrub—over in that corner,” Creed hesitated. “I’d like to get you some of the bubbies. My mother used to pick ’em and put ’em in the bureau drawers I remember, and they made everything smell nice.”

He had taken her hand and led her with him, advancing uncertainly toward the flowers. He felt her shiver, and halted instantly.

“Yo’ cold!” he said. “Let me take my coat off and put it around ye—I don’t need it. You got overheated playing back there, and now you’ll catch a cold.”

“Oh, no,” disclaimed Judith, whose little shudder had been as much from excitement as from the sharp chill of the night air after the heated play-room. “I reckon somebody jest walked over my grave—I ain’t cold.”

But he had pulled off the coat while he spoke, and now he turned to put it about her, and drew her back to the doorstep. Judith was full of a strange ecstasy as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. The lover’s earliest and favourite artifice—the primitive kindness of wrapping her in his own garment! Even Creed, unready and unschooled as he was, felt stir within him its intimate appeal.

A nebulous lightening which had been making itself felt behind the eastern line of mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To that challenge the native man in him—the lover—so long usurped by the zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered and uncertain, to respond. Something heady and ancient and eternally young seemed to pass into his soul out of the night and the moonlight and the shining of her eyes. He was all alive to her nearness, her loveliness, to the sweet sense that she was a young woman, he a young man, and the loveliness and the dearness of her were his for the trying—for the winning. His breath caught in his throat.

“Wait a minute,” he whispered hurriedly, though she had not moved. With eager hands he wrapped the coat close about her. “Let’s sit here on the doorstep and talk awhile. There are a heap of things I want to ask you about—that I want to tell you.”

Young beauty and belle that she was, Judith had been sought and courted, in that most primitive society, since she was fourteen. She was love’s votary by birthright, and her wit and her emotions were schooled in love’s game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should be made love’s final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught him the ways of courtship.

Fire-flies sparkled everywhere, thickest over the marshy places. A mole cricket was chirring in the grass by the old doorstone. Sharp on the soft dark air came the call of that woodland night bird which the mountain people say cries “chip-out-o’-white-oak,” and which others translate “chuck-wills-widow.”

“I—” he began, hesitated momentarily, then daunted, grasped at the familiar things of his life—“I don’t get on very well up here. I’m afraid I’ve made a failure of it; but”—he turned to her in a curious, groping entreaty, his hat in his hands, the dim moonlight full on his fair head and in his eager eyes—“but if you would help me—with you—I think I ought to——”

“I say made a failure!” cooed Judith in her rich, low tones. “You ax me whatever you want to know. You tell me what it is that you’re aimin’ to do—I say made a failure!”

Her trust was so hearty, so wholesale, she filled so instantly the position not only of sweetheart but of mother to a small boy with an unsatisfactory toy—that would always be Judith Barrier—that Creed’s heart—the man’s heart—a lonely one, and beginning to feel itself misunderstood and barred out from its kind—melted in his bosom. There was silence between them, a silence vibrant with the coming utterance. But even as the dark, fond, inviting eyes and the troubled, kindling blue ones encountered, as Creed lifted the girl’s hand timidly, and essayed speech, the voice of that one who had stepped on her grave harshly aroused them both.

“I vow—I thort it was thieves, an’ I was a-goin’ to see could I pick off you-all,” drawled Blatchley Turrentine’s level tones from the shadow of the garden. Mutely, with a sense of chill and disappointment that was like the shock of a physical blow to each, the two young creatures got to their feet and turned to leave the place, preparing to go by the high road, without consultation. As they passed him near the gate, Blatch Turrentine fell in on the other side of the girl and walked with them silently for a time.

“Iley sont me over,” he said finally. “She was skeered you-all wouldn’t bring any plates.”

Neither Judith nor Creed offered any explanation. Instead:

“Well, I don’t see how you’re goin’ to help anything,” said the girl bitterly—any presence must have been hateful to her which interrupted or forestalled what Creed would certainly have said, that for which her whole twenty years had waited.

“Oh, I’ve got the plates,” chuckled Blatch, jingling a bulky package under his arm.

“Why, how did you——” began Judith in amazement.

“Uh-huh, I’ve got my own little trick of gittin’ in whar I choose to go,” declared Turrentine. He leaned around and looked meaningly at the man on her other side, then questioned, “How long do you-all reckon I’d been thar?” and examined them keenly in the shadowy half light.

But neither hastened to disclaim or explain, neither seemed in any degree embarrassed, though to both his bearing was plainly almost intolerable. Thereafter they walked in silence which was scarcely broken till they reached the gate and Iley came shrilling out to meet them demanding,

“Did you get them thar plates from Miz. Lusk’s, you Blatch Turrentine?”

Judith looked at him with angry scorn. It was the old tyrannical trick which she had known from her childhood up, the attempt to maintain an ascendency over her by appearing to know everything and be everywhere—“like he was the Lord-a’mighty Hisself,” she muttered indignantly, as Creed joined a group of young men, and she passed in to her necessary activities as hostess.

Judith Barrier’s play-party won to its close with light hearts and light feet, with heavy hearts which the weary body would fain have denied, with love and laughter, with jealousy and chagrin, with the slanted look of envy, of furtive admiration, or of disparagement, from feminine eyes at the costumes of other women, just as any ball does.

The two who had trembled upon the brink of some personal revelation, a closer communion, were not again alone together that evening. Amid the moving figures of the others, now to his eyes as painted automatons, Creed Bonbright watched with strong fascination in which there was a tincture that was almost terror, the beautiful girl who had suddenly emerged from her class and become for him the one woman.

So adequate, so competent, Judith dominated the situation; passing among her guests, the thick dark lashes continually lowered toward her crimson cheeks. Some subtle sense told her that the spell was working. Smiles from this sweet inner satisfaction curved her red lips. No need to look—she knew how his eyes were following her. The exultant knowledge of it sang all through her being. Gone were her perturbations, her chilling uncertainties. She was at once stimulated and quieted.

Their good-byes were said in the most public manner, yet one glance flashed between them which asked and promised an early meeting.