Kimbro shook his head. "Don't you name nothin' to the girl, except that she's welcome in this house as long as she cares to stay—and don't say too much about that—she knows it."
"Lance has fixed it up with old man Daggett so that Callista can get what she wants from the store—Derf's place," put in Sylvane.
An expression of relief dawned upon Roxy's thin, anxious face. The Kimbro Cleaverages were very poor. Truly, Callista, the admired, was welcome, yet the seams of their narrow resources would fairly gape with the strain to cover the entertainment of such a guest. If she could get what she wanted from Derf's, it would simplify matters greatly.
"Well, you'll tell her that, won't ye, Buddy?" his sister prompted Sylvane.
He nodded.
"I've got some other things to tell her from Lance," he said, boyishly secretive. "I'm goin' over to see him at the mill come, Sunday, and she can send word by me. I'll be passin' back and forth all the time whilst he's workin' there."
But when this easy method of communication was brought to the 217 notice of Callista, she made no offer toward using it.
It was mid-afternoon of the day following her arrival. The rain was intermitted, not definitely ceased; there would be more of it; but just now the air was warm and the sun brilliant. Mountain fashion, the door of the cabin stood wide. Mary Ann Martha had a corn pone, and she took occasional bites from it as she circled the visitor, staring at her with avid, hazel eyes, that troubled Callista's calm whenever she caught the fire of them, so like Lance's. Marauding chickens came across the door-stone and ventured far on the child's trail of crumbs; the light cackle of their whispered duckings, the scratch of their claws on the puncheons, alone broke the stillness. Callista sat by the doorway, a dead weight at her heart. The pallor, the weariness of it, were plain in her face.
"Good land, Polly—cain't you take this chap over yon in the woods and lose her?" demanded the widow in final exasperation, as Mary Ann Martha turned suddenly on the chicken that was stalking her, and shooed it, squalling, from the door. "I want to get out my quilt and work on it."
All unconscious that these things were done on her behalf, Callista saw the unwilling Mary Ann Martha marched away. She beheld the gospel quilt brought out and spread on the widow's 218 knees quite as some chatelaine of old might have produced her tapestry for the diversion of the guest. Over the gulf of pain and regret and apprehension—this well of struggling, seething emotion—lightly rippled the surface sounds of life, material talk, bits of gossip, that Callista roused herself to harken to and answer.