He turned quickly from the outstretched hand.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, and his tone was like Jerry Pollard’s.

Eugenia’s hand fell to her side, closing upon the folds of her skirt.  She caught her lip between her teeth with a petulant twitch.  Then she came forward and laid a small brown bit of cloth upon the counter.

“A spool of silk this shade,” she said briskly.  “Please match it very carefully.”

Nicholas pulled open the small drawers containing the silk, and compared the sample with the row of spools.  He made his selection, showing it to Eugenia before wrapping it in brown paper.

“Is that all?” he asked grimly.

Eugenia nodded.  He gave her the spool, and she lifted her skirt and went out of the shop.  A moment more, and she passed the door swiftly on the brown mare.  Nicholas closed the drawer and laid the torn sheet of wrapping paper back in its place.  A little girl came in for a card of hooks and eyes for her mother, a dressmaker, and he gave them to her and dropped the nickel in the till.  When she went out he followed her to the door and stood looking out into the gray dust of the street.

Across the way a lady was gathering roses from a vine that clambered over her piazza, and the sunlight struck straight at her gracious figure.  From afar off came the sound of children laughing.  Down the street several mild-eyed Jersey cows were driven by a little negro to the court-house green.  In a near tree a wood-bird sang a score of dreamy notes.  Gradually the quiet of the scene wrought its spell upon him—­the insistent languor drugged him like a narcotic.  On the wide, restless globe there is perhaps no village of three streets, no settlement that has been made by man, so utterly the cradle of quiescence.  From the listless battlefields, where grass runs green and wild, to the little whiter washed gaol, where roses bloom, it is a petrified memory, a perennial day dream.

The lady across the street passed under her rose vine, her basket filled with creamy clusters.  The cows filed lazily on the court-house green.  The wood-bird in the near tree sang over its dreamy notes.  The clear black shadows in the street lay like full-length figures across the vivid sunlight.

The bitterness passed slowly from his lips.  He turned, and was reentering the shop, when his name was called sharply.

“Why, Nick Burr!”

The words were Eugenia’s, but the voice was Tom Bassett’s.  He had come up suddenly with the judge, and as Nicholas turned he caught his hand in a hearty grasp.

“Well, I call this luck!” he cried.  “I say, Nick, you haven’t grown bald since I saw you.  Do you remember the time you shaved every strand of hair off your head so we’d stop calling you ’Carrotty’?”

“I remember you called me ‘Baldy,’” said Nicholas, running his hand through his thick, red hair.  Then he looked at the judge.  “I hope you are well, sir,” he added.