child into her lap.
The girl threw her arms about this Charlotte in the old white dress,
and then, because her eyes were full of foolish tears, ran on, for the
Captain was on the porch, in a cane arm-chair, a line of blue smoke
trailing up from the cigar in his fingers. Laughing and breathless she
went up the steps and their eyes met. Never a word spoke either, but
the hand of the man closed on the girl's and rested there until the
others came up.
"Willy wouldn't let me do a thing about your coming, Alexina," Mrs.
Leroy began, as she reached them; "he said he'd tend to it himself and
wouldn't let me give a direction. He's fussy sometimes and notionate,
like the time when the surveyors were staying with us, and Mandy set
some dishes on a chair. I'd already told him she didn't know how to
clear a table for dessert, and he said I ought to have taught her."
The girl's eyes danced. "You're all of you the same, the very same;
not one of the three has changed."
Charlotte beamed. She took it with undisguised pleasure that she had
not changed.
King came round the house. He had taken the mules to the stable. "I'm
holding you to that bargain," he reminded Alexina.
Molly looked bored. Such things were only playful and interesting as
she was part of them. Then she said she was tired, evidently having no
mind for a morning with Mrs. Leroy.
"You shall go up and lie down in my room," said Charlotte.
The three women went in. The hall dividing the house was wide and
high, its floor of boards a foot wide, and bare but for a central
strip of carpet; an old mahogany hat-tree stood against one wall, a
mahogany sofa against the other, with straight backed chairs flanking
both. It was all labouriously clean and primly bare.
The rooms up-stairs were big, with old mahogany furniture set squarely
about them.
"They didn't want me to bring the furniture, Willy and his father,
when we came," Charlotte told Alexina; "it cost more to get it here
than to buy new, but I didn't want new; I wanted this."
Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any
pictures. She explained this.
"I don't know how to drive nails," she told them, "and Willy and the
Captain don't care. Willy had the house papered this fall in case of
people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out
the walls and he won't bother to put them in. They're all in here."
Charlotte didn't mean the nails; she threw open a closet doo
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