road. Elizabeth Ann looked up at the old man for instructions. But he
was deep in his figures. She had been taught never to interrupt people,
so she sat still and waited for him to tell her what to do.

But, although they were driving in the midst of a winter thaw, it was a
pretty cold day, with an icy wind blowing down the back of her neck. The
early winter twilight was beginning to fall, and she felt rather empty.
She grew very tired of waiting, and remembered how the grocer's boy at
home had started his horse. Then, summoning all her courage, with an
apprehensive glance at Uncle Henry's arithmetical silence, she slapped
the reins up and down on the horses' backs and made the best imitation
she could of the grocer's boy's cluck. The horses lifted their heads,
they leaned forward, they put one foot before the other ... they were off!
The color rose hot on Elizabeth Ann's happy face. If she had started a
big red automobile she would not have been prouder. For it was the first
thing she had ever done all herself ... every bit ... every smitch! She had
thought of it and she had done it. And it had worked!

Now for what seemed to her a long, long time she drove, drove so hard
she could think of nothing else. She guided the horses around stones,
she cheered them through freezing mud-puddles of melted snow, she kept
them in the anxiously exact middle of the road. She was quite astonished
when Uncle Henry put his pencil and paper away, took the reins from her
hands, and drove into a yard, on one side of which was a little low
white house and on the other a big red barn. He did not say a word, but
she guessed that this was Putney Farm.

Two women in gingham dresses and white aprons came out of the house. One
was old and one might be called young, just like Aunt Harriet and Aunt
Frances. But they looked very different from those aunts. The dark-