The south door opened on a flagged walk that led to Aunt Affy’s flower garden, the north door led you out into a deep, square, grassy yard, where the clothes were hung and bleached; a tall, shaggy pine stood sentinel at one side of the door, on the other side ran the bench upon which the milk-pans shone in a row; beyond the grass rose a stone wall, and then there were fields and woods; woods in which the thrush hid, and the whip-poor-will; a brook started from a spring in the woods and tumbled over the pebbles down into the meadows, then out, below the flower garden and across the road, where it was bridged with a stone arch. In the kitchen was a brick oven, its iron door stood out black among the white-washed bricks; the uneven boards of the kitchen were always scrubbed clean, the stove was brushed into a shining blackness every day, the two tables were as spotless as sand, the scrubbing-brush and Aunt Affy’s strong hands could make them. Out of the three windows were pictures of which the city-bred girl never wearied. Her apple-blossom spring was the spring of her new birth. “Aunt Rody, please excuse me,” Judith said, rising from the dinner table. “You haven’t eaten your custard, and you like it with crab-apple jelly.” The yellow custard in the big coffee-cup with a broken handle, and the generous spoonful of jelly quivering on top was a temptation; she looked at it, then pushed it away. Nobody would ever know that she was punishing herself for being “rude” in church; it was easier to punish herself than to apologize to Mr. Kenney; and something had to be done. “I want to study my Sunday-school lesson,” she evaded, and then her heart sank at her deception; she had not told Aunt Rody all the truth. She fled into the parlor with a question from Aunt Rody pursuing her; her cheeks were burning, and she was trembling with shame and anger. Why couldn’t Aunt Rody leave her alone? Sometimes she almost hated Aunt Rody. A corner of the stiff, long, horse-hair sofa was her retreat; it was often her retreat; she called it her valley of humiliation. In her lesson to-day she found the loveliest thing. Aunt Affy was teaching her that the Bible was a treasure-house. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” All men know—just by loving—not by doing any great hard thing—by loving—but that was hard, if it meant bearing with Aunt Rody’s misunderstanding and sharpness and fault-finding, and being always on the watch to find evil in you. But “all men know” was the comfort of it; she need not pray in prayer meeting as Miss Kenney did, nor do the wonderful things the disciples did; all men would know that she wanted to be a Christian, if she tried to be loving. She repeated the words of Christ in a soft monotone, her small Bible in her hand, and her head pillowed on her hair on the hard sofa-arm. Aunt Affy pushed the door wider and entered, bringing a glass half filled with crab-apple jelly.