a background, only a setting, for this extraordinary sensation. He
sat up, after awhile, looked at the familiar porch, with the
potted flowers, and Alix's boxes, where bachelor's-buttons,
marguerites, and geraniums had been alternated to make a touch of
patriotic colour on July Fourth. The hills beyond still swam in
the hot sunlight, the mountain rose into the blue, but the light
that changes all life lay over them for Peter.

He said to himself that it was awkward--he did not know how he
could enter that door and talk to Cherry. And yet he knew that
that meeting of Cherry, that the common exchange of words and
glances, that the daily trifling encounters with Cherry were all
poignantly significant now. Or if he did not fully sense all this
yet he felt thrilled to the soul with the knowledge that she was
there, back in the shadowy house somewhere, with the pale striped
gown and the disordered corn-coloured hair, and that somehow they
must meet, somehow they must talk together.

He felt no impulse toward hurry. He might sit on this porch
another hour, might saunter off toward the creek. It mattered
nothing; the hour was steadily approaching when she must reappear.

Alix drove in, full of animated apologies. She managed the car far
better than he, and no thought of an accident had troubled him.
But she explained that she had been to get eggs for a setting hen,
and Antone had stopped her and told her that the new calf had been
prematurely born, out on the hills, and had "been gone for die,"
and so she had driven over to Juanita, and gotten the calf.

And there the calf was, two days old, and as pretty as only a baby