CHAPTER II


In the meantime, Maggie was walking shoeless and bonnetless up the hill to
the farm she sought. It was a hot morning in June, tempered by a wind from
the north-west. The land was green with the slow-rising tide of the young
corn, among which the cool wind made little waves, showing the brown earth
between them on the somewhat arid face of the hill. A few fleecy clouds
shared the high blue realm with the keen sun. As she rose to the top of the
road, the gable of the house came suddenly in sight, and near it a sleepy
old gray horse, treading his ceaseless round at the end of a long lever,
too listless to feel the weariness of a labour that to him must have seemed
unprogressive, and, to anything young, heart-breaking. Nor did it appear to
give him any consolation to be aware of the commotion he was causing on the
other side of the wall, where a threshing machine of an antiquated sort
responded with multiform movement to the monotony of his round-and-round.

Near by, a peacock, as conscious of his glorious plumage as indifferent to
the ugliness of his feet, kept time with undulating neck to the motion of
those same feet, as he strode with stagey gait across the cornyard, now and
then stooping to pick up a stray grain spitefully, and occasionally
erecting his superb neck to give utterance to a hideous cry of satisfaction
at his own beauty--a cry as unlike the beauty as ever was discord to
harmony. His glory, his legs and his voice, perplexed Maggie with an
unanalyzed sense of contradiction and unfitness.

Radiant with age and light, the old horse stood still just as the sun
touched the meridian; the hour of repose and food was come, and he knew it;
and at the same moment the girl, passing one of the green-painted doors of