“I ain’t studyin’ about gittin’ wedded,” she told him most untruthfully. “Looks like I’m a mighty cold-hearted somebody, Elder Drane. I jest can’t fix it no way but to live here with my Uncle Jep and take care of him in his old days. Oh, would you wait a minute?” as they reached the horse-block and the Elder began to untie his mount with a discouraged countenance. “Jest let me run back to the house—I won’t keep you a second. I got some little sugar cookies for Mart and Lucy.”
Mart and Lucy were the Elder’s children. He stood looking after her as she ran lithely up the path, and wondered why she could love them so much and him so little. She came back laughing and a bit out of breath.
“I expect we’ll have company to-day,” she told him comfortably. “We always do when there’s preaching at the church, and I ’low I’d better stay home and see to the dinner.”
The Elder had scarcely made his chastened adieux when the Lusk girls came through the grove walking on either side of a young man.
The Lusk girls were Judith’s nearest neighbours—if you excepted Huldah Spiller at Jim Cal’s cabin, and at the present Judith certainly was in the mind to make an exception of her. The sisters were seldom seen apart; narrow shouldered, short waisted, thin limbed young creatures, they were even at seventeen bowing to a deprecating stoop. Their little faces were alike, short-chinned with pink mouths inclined to be tremulous, the eyes big, blue, and half-frightened in expression, and the drab hair drawn away from the small foreheads so tightly that it looked almost grey. They inevitably reminded one of a pair of blue and white night-moths, scarcely fitted for a daylight world, and continually afraid of it.
“Cousin Lacey’s over from the Far Cove,” called Pendrilla before they reached Judith. “Ain’t it fine? Ef we-all can git up a play-party he says he’ll shore come ef we let him know in time.”
The young fellow with them, their cousin Lacey Rountree, showed sufficient resemblance to mark the family type, but his light eyes were lit with reckless fires, and his short chin was carried with a defiant tilt.
“What you foolin’ along o’ that old feller for, Judith?” he asked jerking an irreverent thumb after the departing Elder.
“I wasn’t fooling with him,” returned Judith, her red lips demure, her brown eyes laughing above them through their thick fringe of lashes. “Elder Drane was consulting me about church matters—sech as children like you have no call to meddle with.”
Young Rountree smiled, “I’ll bet he was!” picking up a stone and firing it far into the blue in sheer exuberance of youthful joy. “Did he name anything about a weddin’ in church?”