“School teacher came along an’ maw made Sairy go with him in his buggy,” exclaimed Lucas, with a broad grin. “If Sairy don’t ketch a feller ’fore long, an’ clamp to him, ’twon’t be maw’s fault.”
Lucas was evidently much impressed by the appearance of Lyddy and ’Phemie when they locked the side door and climbed into the buckboard. Because of their mother’s recent death the girls had dressed very quietly; but their black frocks were now very shabby, it was coming warmer weather, and the only dresses they owned which were fit to wear to an evening function of any kind were those that they had worn “for best” the year previous.
But the two girls from the city had no idea they would create such a sensation as they did when Lucas pulled in the ponies with a flourish and stopped directly before the door of the schoolhouse.
The building was already lighted up and there was quite an assemblage of young men and boys about the two front entrances. On the girls’ porch, too, a number of the feminine members of the Temperance Club were grouped, and with them Sairy Pritchett.
Her own arrival with the schoolmaster had been an effective one and she had waited with the other girls to welcome the newcomers from Hillcrest Farm, and introduce them to her more particular friends.
But the Bray girls looked as though they were from another sphere. Not that their frocks were so fanciful in either design or material; but there was a style about them that made the finery of the other girls look both cheap and tawdry.
“So them stuck-up things air goin’ to live ’round here; be they?” whispered one rosy-cheeked, buxom farmer’s daughter to Sairy Pritchett–and her whisper carried far. “Well, I tell you right now I don’t like their looks. See that Joe Badger; will you? He’s got to help ’em down out o’ Lucas’s waggin’; has he? Well, I declare!”
“An’ Hen Jackson, too!” cried another girl, shrilly. “They’d let airy one of us girls fall out on our heads.”
“Huh!” said Sairy, airily, “if you can’t keep Joe an’ Hen from shinin’ around every new gal that comes to the club, I guess you ain’t caught ’em very fast.”
“He, he!” giggled another. “Sairy thinks she’s hooked the school teacher all right, and that he won’t get away from her.”