nd going in two pale cheeks, and a mist of tears swimming in
two brilliant dark eyes.

Rebecca's journey had ended.

"There's the stage turnin' into the Sawyer girls' dooryard," said Mrs.
Perkins to her husband. "That must be the niece from up Temperance way.
It seems they wrote to Aurelia and invited Hannah, the oldest, but
Aurelia said she could spare Rebecca better, if 't was all the same to
Mirandy 'n' Jane; so it's Rebecca that's come. She'll be good comp'ny
for our Emma Jane, but I don't believe they'll keep her three months!
She looks black as an Injun what I can see of her; black and kind of
up-an-comin'. They used to say that one o' the Randalls married a
Spanish woman, somebody that was teachin' music and languages at a
boardin' school. Lorenzo was dark complected, you remember, and this
child is, too. Well, I don't know as Spanish blood is any real
disgrace, not if it's a good ways back and the woman was respectable."

II

REBECCA'S RELATIONS

They had been called the Sawyer girls when Miranda at eighteen, Jane at
twelve, and Aurelia at eight participated in the various activities of
village life; and when Riverboro fell into a habit of thought or
speech, it saw no reason for falling out of it, at any rate in the same
century. So although Miranda and Jane were between fifty and sixty at
the time this story opens, Riverboro still called them the Sawyer
girls. They were spinsters; but Aurelia, the youngest, had made what
she called a romantic marriage and what her sisters termed a mighty
poor speculation. "There's worse things than bein' old maids," they
said; whether they thought so is quite another matter.

The element of romance in Aurelia's marriage existed chiefly in the
fact that Mr. L. D. M. Randall had a soul above farming or trading and
was a votary of the Muses. He taught the weekly singing-school (then a
feature of village life) in half a dozen neighboring towns, he played
the violin and "called off" at dances, or evoked rich harmonies from
church melodeons on Sundays. He taught certain uncouth lads, when they
were of an age to enter society, the intricacies of contra dances, or
the steps of the schottische and mazurka, and he was a marked figure in
all social assemblies, though conspicuously absent from town-meetings
and the purely masculine gatherings at the store or tavern or bridge.

His hair was a little longer, his hands a little whiter, his shoes a
little thinner, his manner a trif