are."

Susan was staring stupidly at the house--at her new home.

"Git down," he said sharply. "You don't act as if your hearin'
or your manners was much to brag on."

He felt awkward and embarrassed with this delicately bred,
lovely child-woman in the, to him, wonderfully fine and
fashionable dress. To hide his nervousness and to brave it out,
he took the only way he knew, the only way shy people usually
know--the way of gruffness. It was not a ferocious gruffness for
a man of his kind; but it seemed so to her who had been used to
gentleness only, until these last few days. His grammar, his
untrained voice, his rough clothes, the odor of stale sweat and
farm labor he exhaled, made him horrible to her--though she only
vaguely knew why she felt so wretched and why her body shrank
from him.

She stepped down from the sulky, almost falling in her dizziness
and blindness. Jeb touched the mare with the whip and she was
alone before the house--a sweet forlorn figure, childish,
utterly out of place in those surroundings. On the threshold, in
faded and patched calico, stood a tall gaunt woman with a family
likeness to Jeb. She had thin shiny black hair, a hard brown
skin, high cheekbones and snapping black eyes. When her thin
lips parted she showed on the left side of the mouth three large
and glittering gold teeth that in the contrast made their gray,
not too clean neighbors seem white.

"Howdy!" she called in a tone of hostility.

Susan tried in vain to respond. She stood gazing.

"What d'ye want?"

"He he told me to go in," faltered Susan. She had no sense of
reality. It was a dream--only a dream--and she would awaken in
her own clean pretty pale-gray bedroom with Ruth gayly calling
her to come down to breakfast.

"Who are you?" demanded Keziah--for at a glance it was the sister.

"I'm--I'm Susan Lenox."

"Oh--Zeke Warham's niece. Come right in." And Keziah looked as
if she were about to bite and claw.

Susan pushed open the latchless gate, went up the short path to
the doorstep. "I think I'll wait till he comes," she said.

"No. Come in and sit down, Miss Lenox." And Keziah drew a
rush-bottomed rocking chair toward the doorway. Susan was
looking at the interior. The lower floor of the house was
divided into three small rooms. This central room was obviously
the parlor--the calico-covered sofa, the center table, the two
dingy chromos, and a battered cottage organ made that certain.
On the