“I’ll have the milk and thank you kindly. Isn’t that Sally peeping out of the dairy window?” “Yes, she’s dairy-maid this week, and will give you the milk. You’ll catch her in her short gown and petticoat.” “Won’t she be vexed?” asked the young man, with a smile anything but heart-broken. “She’ll not eat you if she is. Open the door of a sudden and catch her at work,” whispered Betty; and Alick, the smile broadening into mischief, sharply pushed back the cleated door, revealing the figure of a tall girl, who, with arms bare to the shoulders, was at that moment tossing a great mass of yellow butter high into the air, her lithe form well displayed as she leaned back and held up her hands to catch her ponderous plaything. A linen cloth pinned around the forehead just above the brows formed a piquant frame for the rosy, dimpling Greuze face, with its sweet blue eyes and pure but tender lips; a lovely innocent maiden, and as Alick Standish looked at her as if for the first time, while she, suffering the butterball to drop upon the stone slab in front of her, would fain have pulled her kirtle straight, but dared not touch it with her moist hands, and half cried in her pretty confusion, he knew as by a revelation that all his other fancies had been but dreams and follies, and here before him stood the woman, whom out of all the world he would choose to be his wife,--the woman whom he could love, and love to the end. But while the man’s heart leaped up within him, like his who, searching for mica, suddenly comes upon diamonds, all that rose to the lips was a little laugh, and the prosaic petition,-- “Might I have a noggin of milk?” “Surely. Betty shall give it you-- Nay, she’s gone. Well, wait but till I wash my hands and put my butter down in the cellar hole. Mayhap you’ll lift up the trap for me.” “Of course I will! Where is it?” “Just here.” And tapping with one foot, Sally Alden showed an iron ring set into the floor, and evidently intended to raise a big trap door in the middle of the dairy. Throwing it back so that it rested upon the floor, Alick looked down the steep steps into the little deep and cool cellar, which in those days imperfectly forestalled the refrigerator of to-day. “Let me carry down the butter for you, Sally,” said he. “’Tis too steep.” “’Tis no steeper than it was last week, or will be next,” laughed Sally in a sweet tremor of bashful joy; for Alick was her hero, and hitherto had only treated her as one of the children. “But if you like, you may hand me the dish after I am down.” “Yes, indeed. It looks like the head of John Baptist on a charger, as ’tis seen in the Elder’s big Bible.” “And so it does,” replied the girl, glancing with a new interest at the great ball of butter in the middle of the pewter platter, which Alexander held aloft in mimicry of the picture both had seen as children.