"If you're wondering how Agnes gets home, she goes cross-lots, right
through the scrub-oak 'n' poison ivy 'n black-b'ries, 'f she's in a
hurry. She ain't afraid o' rain; like's not, she stays down to the shore
the whole 'durin' day."

"I suppose the people here talk about her."

"Most of 'em have too much to do to talk," replied Mrs. Libby, smoothing
down her shining bands of hair before the hanging glass, and regarding
her reflected large, white face and set smile, with dull satisfaction
and vanity. "They're used to her now."

One glaring afternoon within the week, I sat out on the tiny porch, idly
watching a fat spider throw his ropes from the box-bush to the step. I
had been sitting there for three hours, and only one creaking farm-wagon
had passed, and two dirty brown-legged children. The air was breathless
and spicy, and in the rough clearing opposite, the leaves seemed to
curve visibly in the intense heat. Did anything ever happen here? It
seemed to me as much out of the range of possible happenings as the
grave.

"There's Agnes coming," said Mrs. Libby, inarticulately. She held
between her lips some ravellings and bits of thread, and she was sitting
by the open window, laboriously pushing her needle through a piece of
heavy unbleached cloth.

The young woman who came swaying delicately along the path, with
something of the motion of a tall stalk of grass in the wind, wore a
scanty white gown, which defined almost cruelly the slenderness of form,