The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with my basket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged, barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the great sycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life the thought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as she had stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holding her mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me with her sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes, dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later, as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her houses of moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as a woman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her a little above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on. The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and I went over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was she merely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaning in her divine smile--in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you have won!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of her bosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modest or humble I had never been. The will to fight--the exaggerated self-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has made his way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking there that morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and the blood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which I had carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep. She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was that because she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for her sake?--that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well as to achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered, have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but with no social manner," the voice had said of me, and the words burned now, hot with shame, in my memory. The recollection of my fall in the dance, of the crying lips of the pretty girl in pink tarlatan, while she stood holding her ruined flounce, became positive agony. What did she think of my boorishness? Was I, for her also, merely a magnificent animal? Had she noticed how ill at ease I felt in my evening clothes? O young Love, young Love, your sharpest torments are not with arrows, but with pin pricks!