"Yes, and I'm comin' same as Christmas with both hands full of gifts," she called out to him gaily. How dared he look like that—as though he knew all her straits—the shifts to which she was now reduced?
There had sounded from the house, on Roxy's arrival there, wails of lamentation in Mary Ann Martha's voice—wails so strident and so offensively prolonged as to convince the least discriminating hearer that their author was not being hurt, but was only incensed. Now, Roxy Griever, hastily washed, made her appearance.
"I'm mighty proud to have you here to-day, Miz. Gentry," she said hospitably. "Won't you come into the house? Have you-all fixed for pumpkin cutting? I just as soon as not come over and 181 he'p you, oncet I git this mis'able sawgrum out of the way."
"Thank you, Miz. Griever, I won't go in for a spell yet," Octavia said, seating herself on a bench. "No, we ain't had a chance to think o' pumpkin cuttin'. I been dryin' fruit. And Pappy's had everybody on the place busy pickin' field peas."
Callista harkened restively to this talk of the harvest activities, the season's plenty—she who had nothing to garner, nothing to prepare and put away. She heard her mother's voice running plaintively on.
"Looks like I got to have somebody with me, since Sis is gone. I've been aimin' to git over to the Far Cove neighborhood where my cousin Filson Luster lives. I know in reason Fil could spare one of his gals, an' I'd do well by her."
The words were softly, drawlingly, spoken, yet Callista, mechanically working still about the furnace, heard in them the slam of a door. Her girlhood home was closed to her. The daughter's place there, which she had held so lightly, would be filled.