reddenin' up till I swan to man I thought it must be breakin' out in
blisters. 'Never see anybody that looked just like me, did you, Sis?' I
says to her, when I couldn't stand it any longer. 'No, sir,' she says,
solemn as an owl. She was right out and honest, I'll say that for her.
That's the only time Marcellus laughed while we was inside that house.
I didn't blame him much. Ho, ho! Well, he ain't laughin' now and neither
are we--or we hadn't ought to be. Neither is the child, I cal'late, poor
thing. I wonder what will become of her."


And meanwhile the child herself was vaguely, and in childish fashion,
wondering that very thing. She was in the carriage room of the barn
belonging to the Hall estate--if the few acres of land and the buildings
owned by the late Marcellus may be called an estate--curled up on the
back seat of the old surrey which had been used so little since the
death of her mother, Augusta Hall, four years before. The surrey was
shrouded from top to floor with a dust cover of unbleached muslin
through which the sunshine from the carriage room windows filtered in a
mysterious, softened twilight. The covered surrey was a favorite retreat
of Mary-'Gusta's. She had discovered it herself--which made it doubly
alluring, of course--and she seldom invited her juvenile friends to
share its curtained privacy with her. It was her playhouse, her tent,
and her enchanted castle, much too sacred to be made common property.
Here she came on rainy Saturdays and on many days not rainy when other
children, those possessing brothers or sisters, played out of doors. She
liked to play by herself, to invent plays all her own, and these other
children--"normal children," their parents called them--were much
too likely to laugh instead of solemnly making believe as she did.
Mary-'Gusta was not a normal child; she was "that queer Lathrop
young-one"--had heard herself so described more than once. She did not