August was a month of drought and intense heat that year; by the first week in September the stream had dwindled to the merest silver thread, its wasted waters floating upward in clouds of impalpable mist at dawn and evening to be lost forever in the empty vault of heaven.  Behind the closed shutters of the village houses, women fanned themselves in the intervals of labor over superheated cookstoves.  Men consulted their thermometers with incredulous eyes.  Springs reputed to be unfailing gradually ceased their cool trickle.  Wells and cisterns yielded little save the hollow sound of the questing bucket.  There was serious talk of a water famine in Brookville.  At the old Bolton house, however, there was still water in abundance.  In jubilant defiance of blazing heavens and parching earth the Red-Fox Spring—­tapped years before by Andrew Bolton and piped a mile or more down the mountain side, that his household, garden and stock might never lack of pure cold water—­gushed in undiminished volume, filling and overflowing the new cement reservoir, which had been one of Lydia Orr’s cautious innovations in the old order of things.

The repairs on the house were by now finished, and the new-old mansion, shining white amid the chastened luxuriance of ancient trees, once more showed glimpses of snowy curtains behind polished windowpanes.  Flowers, in a lavish prodigality of bloom the Bolton house of the past had never known, flanked the old stone walls, bordered the drives, climbed high on trellises and arbors, and blazed in serried ranks beyond the broad sweep of velvet turf, which repaid in emerald freshness its daily share of the friendly water.

Mrs. Abby Daggett gazed at the scene in rapt admiration through the clouds of dust which uprose from under Dolly’s scuffling feet.

“Ain’t that place han’some, now she’s fixed it up?” she demanded of Mrs. Deacon Whittle, who sat bolt upright at her side, her best summer hat, sparsely decorated with purple flowers, protected from the suffocating clouds of dust by a voluminous brown veil.  “I declare I’d like to stop in and see the house, now it’s all furnished up—­if only for a minute.”

“We ain’t got time, Abby,” Mrs. Whittle pointed out.  “There’s work to cut out after we get to Mis’ Dix’s, and it was kind of late when we started.”

Mrs. Daggett relinquished her random desire with her accustomed amiability.  Life consisted mainly in giving up things, she had found; but being cheerful, withal, served to cast a mellow glow over the severest denials; in fact, it often turned them into something unexpectedly rare and beautiful.

“I guess that’s so, Ann,” she agreed.  “Dolly got kind of fractious over his headstall when I was harnessin’.  He don’t seem to like his sun hat, and I dunno’s I blame him.  I guess if our ears stuck up through the top of our bunnits like his we wouldn’t like it neither.”

Mrs. Whittle surveyed the animal’s grotesquely bonneted head with cold disfavor.