painted.

There were other traces of Mrs. Roberts. You might not have noticed
them, but it seemed to Sallie that her fingers had touched everywhere.
Yet the lady herself thought that she had done very little. She had held
her inclinations in check with severe judgment.

The door opened softly, and a mass of golden hair, from out of which
peered great eyes, peeped cautiously in.

"Alone?" it said, nodding first toward the figure on the bed, and
intimating that she was aware of Mark's presence, and did not mean him.

"Yes," said Sallie, "come in; Mark's asleep, but you won't disturb him;
he don't disturb easy; he sleeps just like a baby since the doctor
stopped that pain in his knee. There's my new chair; just try it and see
how nice it is."

Saying which, she got herself out of the little rocker in haste, and
pushed it toward her guest, meantime taking a plain wooden chair, also
new, and adding:--

"Did you ever hear of anybody like her before?"

"Something's happened!" said Mart Colson, ignoring the reference to the
mysterious pronoun,--her voice so full of a new and strange meaning
that had Sallie been acquainted with the word she might have said it was
filled with awe.

As it was, she only exclaimed, "What?" in an intensely interested tone.