the stove pipe, "Clem! Clementina? Go to the front dooa! The'e's somebody
knockin'." The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard within,
and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a little girl, too
childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway, looking down on
the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as a flower's. She
had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and a pretty chin
whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips. She had hair
of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass light prongs,
or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately touched it. Her
tanned face was not very different in color from her hair, and neither
were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles in the calico
skirt she wore. At sight of the elders in the buggy she involuntarily
stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at the same time
she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it, but she lost in
her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of the strangers
seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them while she
waited for them to speak.

"Oh!" Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, "we just
wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount. We've come
from the hotel, and we wa'n't quite ce'tain."

The girl laughed as she said, "Both roads go to South Middlemount'm; they
join together again just a little piece farther on."

The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by vowel
sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in
a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the
vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural New
England.