At this direct appeal the overseer’s daughter at first looked as sorrowful as even Roden could have desired, bursting the next moment into peals and roulades of laughter. Roden, after the first sharp inclination to feel angry, joined in her mirth.
“Pore feller!” she said at last, taking off her rain-soaked hat, on which she appeared to dry her brimming eyes—“Pore feller! it all seems awful to you out here, don’t it?”
“It does,” said Roden in his heart, but out loud he replied with mendacious civility that it did not. He was, moreover, occupied in a close scrutiny of her uncovered locks. They were of a pale golden color, lying close to her forehead in thick, round rings, after the manner of a child’s, and clustering heavily, with the dampness. As he stood beside her he saw also that she was very tall, taller than most tall women, and that her fair throat, rising boy-like from a dark-red kerchief, had unusual suggestions of muscle beneath its smooth surface.
Presently they walked on. The top of a tolerably high hill was soon reached, surmounted, as Roden at first thought, by an almost impenetrable thicket. As they approached nearer, however, he perceived an aperture in the mass of foliage, and a long wooden gate, hanging by one hinge in an aimless, desultory manner, and ornamented also as to its dingy gray with copious splashes of red mud. On either post were rusty iron vases, wherefrom there sprouted two stunted specimens of the aloe tribe. One of these vases, having been broken some years before, hung over to one side with a suggestion of inanimate sentimentality highly ludicrous. Some kind Samaritan had thrust a stick in between its disabled joints, thus preventing it from utter downfall.
The view beyond the gate was unique, and to Roden rather pleasant after his morning’s experience. The lawn proper was shaped like a lady’s slipper, and outlined by a gravel carriage-drive. It seemed as though some Titaness might have set a careless foot among the surrounding shrubbery, crushing out of existence all save a bordering fringe of evergreen and acacias. The long, low house of red brick—with wings out-spread after a protective, hen-like fashion in the direction of the many out-houses—was to be seen through the bare branches of two splendid tulip-trees. A little Alderney heifer was grazing near the portico, and some dorkings stood resignedly on long yellow legs under the shelter of the large box-bushes.
As they worked along the sinuous carriage-way Roden looked with a feeling of ownership at the glimpses of distant hill and forest, as visible through the crowding tree-stems. Here he was to make his home for at least the next two years, and he was glad not to find it so bad as he had expected.
As she opened the hall door the girl said to him, “Father won’t be here until six o’clock. I’ll have you some dinner ef you want it. But you’d better go to your room first, hadn’t you, you’re so wet?—I’ll send you some things the larst Englishman left behind him. There’s a barth ready, and plenty of towels. I’m used to fixin’ for you English, you see. Well, good-by till you’re dressed; then I’ll show you over the house.”
“I CAN’T COME TO DINNER.”