"You ain't broke off with Jerry Norton?"
"Yes. We broke it off together."
"You needn't tell me 'twas Jerry Norton's fault." Mrs. Joyce pushed her cup from her and winked rapidly. "He's as good a boy as ever stepped, an' he sets by you as he does his life."
Stella was regarding her in wonder, a gentle little creature who omitted to say her soul was her own on ordinary days, yet rousing herself, with ruffled feathers, to defend, not her young, but the alien outside the nest.
"If he had give you the mitten, I shouldn't blame him a mite, turnin' him away from the door as you have two Saturday nights runnin'. But he ain't done it. I know Jerry too well for that. His word's as good 's his bond, an' you'll go through the woods an' get a crooked stick at last."
Then she looked across at Stella, as if in amazement over her own fury; but Stella, liking her for it and thrilled by its fervor, laughed out because that was the way emotion took her.
"You can laugh," said her mother, nodding her head, as she rose and began to set away the dishes. "But 'fore you git through with this you'll laugh out o' t'other side o' your mouth, an' so I tell ye."
Upon her words there was a step at the door, and Stella knew the step was Jerry's. Her mother, with the prescience born of ire, knew it too.
"There he is," she said. "Now you go to cuttin' up any didos, things gone as fur as they have, an' you'll repent this night's work the longest day you live. You be a good girl an' go 'n' let him in!"
She had returned to her placidity, a quiet domestic fowl whose feathers were only to be ruffled when some terrifying shadow flitted overhead.