Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/279

 stretched her slim, brown, bare feet out into the sunshine and looked at them with eyes that saw their beauty. She twisted a strand of her lustrous black hair about her finger, made it into a glittering curl and dangled it in the sunlight with a foolish little laugh.

In the yard not far from the kitchen door stood a rose bush, a poor, battered, stunted thing, scratched and nipped by the hens and broken back again and again by straying hogs and calves. Nothing was left of it but a few spiny stalks almost denuded of leaves. On one of these stalks she had noticed a red bud swelling.

One morning when she came to the door she saw that the bud had blossomed into a rose, not a frail pink blossom, but a silken, scarlet thing with a great, gold heart, heavy with dew and fragrance. Gorgeously it flaunted on its distorted stem. Against the drabness of the dooryard, now bare with summer drought, it flamed rich and vivid. She knelt on the ground beside the rose and smelled of its perfume. Inhaling the fragrance and looking into the deep richness of the scarlet leaves, she felt carried beyond herself with a great uplifting of the heart. Tears from some strange, hidden source welled into her eyes.

After its one rose had shed its leaves, the little bush, discouraged by the drought and the continual pecking of the hens, dried up and leveled itself with the ground.

Fearful of shrewd looks and whispering tongues, she did not go often to the meetings. They had other places of rendezvous. One was a deep hollow pungent with the smell of mint, where the creek splashed over moss covered stones and a weeping willow trailed its gray leaves in the water. Here on the hottest July afternoon the overhanging boughs of many trees and saplings made a green coolness. The place seemed remote as a cave until one day Uncle Jonah Cobb came along the little cowpath that bordered the creek. They heard him pushing aside the branches that grew across the unfrequented path and had time to dive back into the underbrush. Half blind and more than half deaf, he took his slow way through