"I say, Nick! The she-ep hev' been driv-en u-p! Come to sup-per!"

She vanished from the post and Nicholas ran up the remainder of the road
and swung himself over the little gate which led into the small square
yard immediately surrounding the house. At the pump near the back door
his father, who had just come from work, was washing his hands before
going into supper, and near a row of pointed chicken coops the three
younger children were "shooing" up the tiny yellow broods. The yard was
unkempt and ugly, run wild in straggling ailanthus shoots and littered
with chips from the wood-pile.

As he entered the house he saw his stepmother placing a dish of fried
bacon upon the table, which was covered with a "watered" oilcloth of a
bright walnut tint. At her back stood Sarah Jane with a plate of corn
bread in one hand and a glass pitcher containing buttermilk in the
other. She was a slight, flaxen-haired child, with wizened features and
sore, red eyelids.

As his stepmother caught sight of him she stopped on her way to the
stove and surveyed him with sharp but not unkindly eyes.

"You've been takin' your time 'bout comin' home," she remarked, "an' I
reckon you're powerful hungry. You can sit down if you want to."

She was long and lean and withered, with a chronic facial neuralgia,
which gave her an irritable expression and a querulous voice. For the
past several years Nicholas had never seen her without a large cotton
handkerchief bound tightly about her face. She had been the boy's aunt
before she married his father, and her affection for him was proved by
her allowing no one to harry him except herself.