"But there is so much of it! We must have come twenty miles from
the railroad station."

"More than that," put in her brother, from his seat in the saddle.

"I don't care!" cried Bess. "It's wonderful."

"Oh, it is wonderful, I grant you," said Grace. "But--but
everything is so big--and open--and lonesome."

"Cheer up, Sis," said Walter. "We are all here to keep you company,
to say nothing of the cows and the horses," and he laughed.

Mrs. Janeway's opinion was practical to say the least, for her
first words were, as the buckboard reached the house: "I certainly
shall be glad to get a bath."

Rhoda had thrown herself from her pony and rushed up the steps of
the veranda to greet two persons who, later, the visitors found
were Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. The former was a rather heavily built,
shaggy-bearded man, his face burned to a brick-red and such part as
the beard did not hide covered with fine lines like a veil. His
wife was a tall and graceful woman who showed nothing in her clear,
wide-open eyes of her blindness which for so many years had set her
apart from other people.

The blind woman stepped with assurance to the edge of the veranda
to greet the visitors, and it was Mrs. Janeway she first met and
embraced.