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 finer and whiter as they neared the zenith, took on a soft flush that turned the whole western sky into a harmony of faint rose and tender blue.

Jabez Moorhouse, passing with a hayfork over his shoulder, stopped for a few moments' chat; and they looked at the sky together, talking of crops and of rain.

As they looked the faint, frail pink gradually deepened into a richer rose, then glowed for a few passionate moments the color of intense flame. The little delicate shreds high up in the sky were each a slender whiff of spun gold, fine and pure. The under edges of the clouds burned with the amber and scarlet of flame against a background of shaded grays and purples. The grayish purple bank that lay along the horizon was slashed here and there by bright swords of fire. The burning clouds hung low, as if one might reach up and touch them. A rosy flush hung over everything.

It seemed as if no color could be warmer, deeper, richer. And yet incredibly as they gazed it grew before their eyes richer, warmer, deeper, more vivid and intense, more full of living fire, until Judith involuntarily held her breath in sympathy with nature in this her supreme moment.

Short-lived it was, like every other supreme moment. A second after it had reached the height of its intensity it began to fade and fall away into ashes. As if a cold breath had passed over them, the little tendrils of spun gold in the zenith turned almost instantly to gray. Lower down the deeper colors lost their glow more slowly, melting back into the surrounding purple. Soon there was left nothing but a somber interweaving of purple gray and dull magenta.

"It's a heap like a man's life, hain't it," said Jabez, spitting into the grass. "It begins happy an' simple, like them innocent pinks an' blues; then turns flame colored when he grows to be a man an' learns to know the love o' wimmin. But it don't stay that color long. Fust thing you know it's gray, like his hair, what he has left of it. Yaas, Judy, the young time's the on'y time. It's the same in dawgs an' mules, an' the breath they draw hain't no diff'rent from ourn."