Chapter XII. “HOME WAS NEVER LIKE THIS”
The roan ponies dashed through the slab settlement, past the blacksmith and wheelwright shop and the ugly red building Tom told Nan was the school, and reached a large, sprawling, unpainted dwelling on the outskirts of the village.
There were barns back of the Sherwood house; there was no fence between the yard and the road, the windows of the house stared out upon the passerby, blindless, and many of them without shades. There was such a painful newness about the building that it seemed to Nan the carpenters must have just packed their tools and gone, while the painters had not yet arrived.
“Well! Here we are,” announced Mr. Henry Sherwood, as Tom held in the still eager ponies. He stepped out and offered Nan his hand. “Home again, little girl. I reckon Kate will be mighty glad to see you, that she will.”
Nan leaped out and began to stamp her feet on the hard snow, while Uncle Henry lifted out the trunk and bags. Just as the ponies sprang away again, a door in the ugly house opened and a tall, angular woman looked forth.
“Bring her in, Hen!” she cried, in a high-pitched voice. “I want to see her.”
Nan went rather timidly up the path. Her aunt was almost as tall as her husband. She was very bony and was flat-chested and unlovely in every way. That is, so it seemed, when the homesick girl raised her eyes to Aunt Kate's face.
That face was as brown as sole-leather, and the texture of the skin seemed leathery as well. There was a hawklike nose dominating the unfeminine face. The shallows below the cheekbones were deep, as though she had suffered the loss of her back molars. The eyebrows were straggly; the eyes themselves of a pale, watery blue; the mouth a thin line when her colorless lips were closed; and her chin was as square and determined as Uncle Henry's own.
As Nan approached she saw something else about this unlovely woman. On her neck was a great, livid scar, of a hand's breadth, and which looked like a scald, or burn. No attempt was made to conceal this unsightly blemish.
Indeed, there was nothing about Aunt Kate Sherwood suggesting a softening of her hard lines. Her plain, ugly print dress was cut low at the throat, and had no collar or ruff to hide the scar. Nan's gaze was fastened on that blemish before she was half way to the door, and she could see nothing else at first.