“Rose Mary,” came Miss Amanda’s cheery little voice from the doorway just in time to save Everett from the wish, if not even a vain attempt, to sink through the floor, “bring Mr. Mark right on in to breakfast before the waffles set.  Sister Viney, your coffee is a-getting cold.”  Little Miss Amanda had seen and guessed at his plight and the coffee threat to Miss Lavinia had been one of the nimble manoeuvers that she daily, almost hourly, employed in the management of her sister’s ponderosity.  Thus she had saved this day, but Everett knew that there were others to come, and in the dim distance he discerned his Waterloo.

And as he worked carefully with his examining pick over beyond the north pasture through the soft spring-warm afternoon, he occasionally smiled to himself as the morning scene of worship, etched deep on his consciousness by its strangeness to his tenets of life, rose again and again to his mind’s eye.  They were a wonderful people, these Valley folk, descendants of the Huguenots and Cavaliers who had taken the wilderness trail across the mountains and settled here “in the hollow” of old Harpeth’s hand.  They were as interesting scientifically from a philosophical standpoint as were the geological formations which lay beneath their blue-grass and clover fields.  They built altars to what seemed to him a primitive God, and yet their codes were in many cases not only ethically but economically and democratically sound.  The men he had found shrewd and as a whole more interested and versed in statescraft than would seem possible, considering their shut-in location in regard to the places where the world wheels seem to revolve.  But were there larger wheels revolving, silently, slowly, but just as relentlessly, out here where the heavens were stretched “as a curtain,” and “as a tent to dwell in?”

“’The earth and the fullness thereof,’” he mused as he raised his eyes to the sky; “it’s theirs, certainly, and they dedicate it to their God.  I wonder—­” Suddenly the picture of the woman in the barn rose to his mind, strong and gracious and wonderful, with the young “fullness” pressing around her, teeming with—­force.  What force—­and what source?  Suddenly he dropped his pick behind a convenient bush, shouldered his kit of rocks and sand, climbed the fence and tramped away down Providence Road to Sweetbriar, Rose Mary and her cold milk crocks, thither impelled by deep—­thirsts.

And under the hospitable eaves of the milk-house he found Rose Mary and her cooling draft—­also Mrs. Caleb Rucker, with small Pete in tow.

“Howdy, Mr. Mark,” the visiting neighbor answered in response to his forcedly cordial greeting.  If a man has walked a mile and a half with a picture of a woman handing him a glass of cool milk with a certain lift of black lashes from over deep, black blue eyes it is—­disconcerting to have her do it in the presence of another.

“I just come over to get a bucket of buttermilk for Granny Satterwhite,” he found Mrs. Rucker saying as he forced his attention.  “She won’t touch mine if there’s any of Rose Mary’s handy.  Looks like she thinks she’s drinking some of Rose Mary’s petting with every gulp.”