you?"

"You bet I'm wild." She tossed her shining curls in the lamp light and added a kettle to the gleaming row of copper vessels hanging along the wall. "I used to bite like everything when I was a little girl."

"Let's see your teeth," said the hired man.

She flashed her white teeth, then opened wide her pretty mouth.

"Yep, you're a biter," Gus said. "But you ain't a day over seventeen by the looks of your molars."

"You don't know anything about girls," said Early Ann. "All you know about is horses."

From the other room came the voice of Sarah reading to Stanley by lamp light. Her voice was sweet, but particularly colorless this evening.

"Where'd you come from anyway?" Gus wanted to know. "And who are your folks? There ain't no Shermans in Brailsford Junction."

"None of your beeswax," the girl said firmly. "It's none of your beeswax where I came from."

"Not that I care," said Gus. "Not that I'm curious. Ishkabibble! I should worry."

"Oh, no. You ain't curious. You just got your tongue hanging out and your eyes popping, that's all. You're just running around like a couple of strange new dogs. You ain't curious."

"It ain't nice for a girl to talk the way you talk," said Gus. "It ain't proper for a girl to talk about dogs like that."

"I wasn't talking about dogs, I was talking about you," Early Ann said.

"Don't you ever want to be a lady, Early Ann? Don't you ever want to ride in a hansom cab or a limousine, with ostrich plumes in your hat, and a parasol? Don't you ever want to learn how to be sweet and talk nice like Sarah Brailsford?"

"She's lovely," said Early Ann with a sigh. "I sure wish I could be like Mrs. Brailsford. But I got a tongue like a little snake. I can't help what my tongue says.... Sure I want to be a lady and ride in a limousine. I want to be as graceful as Irene Castle, and dance like an angel, and have a house with swell brass beds and fumed oak mission furniture like you see in the Hartman catalogue, and a big cut-glass dish for the center of my table, and real lace curtains, and a new Ford with a Disco self-starter and...."

"Gee whiz, you must be figurin' on marrying a millionaire," Gus said.

"I want things," the girl said. "All I've had all my life is work, work, work."

Her fervor had flushed her cheeks and brightened her eyes until the vision of young loveliness before him made Gus forget that he was a woman-hater. He wished he were a good-looking young fellow with some money. She'd get everything she wanted soon enough.

"You better not let Temperance Crandall hear you talk like that," warned Gus. "She'd tell everybody from Stoughton to Fort Atkinson."

"What does she look like?" Early Ann asked with excitement. "Has she got a long scraggly neck and a raggedy black parasol, and a black shawl, and does she wear glasses?"

"That's her," said Gus.

"Let me get my fingers around that hag's neck," said Early Ann.

"You certainly do talk rough," said the hired man. "I wouldn't want to meet you alone somewhere on a dark night."

"She was over here today telling tales about me," said Early Ann. "They shut the door and I was too proud to listen. She's just a.... Oh, Gus, she's just a nasty old busy-body. Mrs. Brailsford came out in the kitchen as white as a ghost after she left and asked for the camphor."

"There's something mysterious about you," said Gus. "I knew it from the night you came."

"It's just talk," said Early Ann. "They don't know a thing. There's nothing in my life to be ashamed of.... But it seems like old ladies just can't leave a girl alone. There's nobody in my past who...."

Early Ann broke off abruptly in the middle of her sentence. Her eyes grew large and the terror crept down her cheeks and caught at the comers of her mouth. She started to scream, then bit her knuckles and with great deliberation turned away from the apparition at the window-pane. By the time Gus had rushed out into the yard no one was to be seen and the starlit night was silent and empty.

In the parlor Sarah still read to Stanley, unaware of anything beyond her own circle of lamp light. But as Early Ann listened in the throbbing stillness she heard the older woman falter and stop. Then she heard quiet weeping.

"Why ... what are you crying about, Mother?" she heard Stanley ask.

"Nothing, nothing at all," Sarah said. "I—I guess I'm just tired, that's all."

CHAPTER III

1

The basement of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Brailsford Junction rang with the shouts of children playing tag despite the scolding of their busy mothers. Flushed matrons buzzed in laden down with loaves of homemade bread, pans of biscuits ready for the oven, mason jars full of sweet, sour, and mixed pickles, bags of ground coffee, and huge pots of dressed and dismembered chickens so tender and plump that their flesh would have warranted the term "voluptuous" if stewed by a less austere generation.

Joe Whalen, town drunk, general roustabout, and janitor of the church was starting a paper fire in the furnace.

"Put in more paper," shouted Old Mrs. Crandall, mother of Temperance, who had left her room for the first time in months for this occasion. "Terrible weather for rheumatism, ain't it?"

"Terrible," shouted Joe.

"You don't need to holler at me," said Old Mrs. Crandall. "I ain't as hard of hearing as all that."

She pulled her shawl a little tighter about her rheumatic shoulders, and cocked a sly old ear for the salty gossip Sister Atwell was passing on to Sister Bailey.

Girls of high school age, whispering and giggling, twisted long streamers of red, white, and blue crêpe paper in dizzy crescents from pillar to pillar of the festive room, while over each blazing chromo the same laughing girls hung shooting stars, bluebells, anemones, and other spring flowers.

The chromos were of the unforgettable period in religious art which offered holy scenes in dazzling triads, stirring masterpieces which could not help but move saints and sinners alike, pictures which carried a message and a warning. "Rock of Ages Cleft for Me" with a courageous lady in a white nightgown hanging perilously to a granite cross amid seas which would have sunk the Titanic; an amazingly tinted "Last Supper"; Christ driving the money changers from the temple with a ferocious rawhide blacksnake which Stud Brailsford privately admitted a man would not use on a team of balky mules.

Flowers were also heaped upon the golden oak upright piano, lacking three ivories, sadly out of tune, and showing unmistakable battle scars from the militant hammering it received during every Sunday School session, no less than from the attempts of Epworth League members to "rag" such sacred selections as "Holy, Holy, Holy."

The kitchen was a mad-house. Along ten feet of glowing griddles perspiring sisters of the Ladies' Aid were stewing chickens, thickening gravy, starting great pots of coffee (two hours before suppertime with the result that church supper coffee had a wallop like 100 proof Bourbon) cutting slices of home-baked bread, quartering apple, pumpkin, and gooseberry pies, whipping half gallons of Jersey cream in wooden bowls two feet in diameter, pouring into boat-shaped cut-glass dishes jars of pickles, glass after glass of jams, jellies and preserves.

Crocks of golden butter and creamy cottage cheese made a formidable bulwark of richly laden earthenware in one corner, while a phalanx of ice cream freezers stood guard beside the kitchen door.