"Cheer up, Sis," said Walter. "We are all here to keep you company, to say nothing of the cows and the horses," and he laughed.
Mrs. Janeway's opinion was practical to say the least, for her first words were, as the buckboard reached the house: "I certainly shall be glad to get a bath."
Rhoda had thrown herself from her pony and rushed up the steps of the veranda to greet two persons who, later, the visitors found were Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. The former was a rather heavily built, shaggy-bearded man, his face burned to a brick-red and such part as the beard did not hide covered with fine lines like a veil. His wife was a tall and graceful woman who showed nothing in her clear, wide-open eyes of her blindness which for so many years had set her apart from other people.
The blind woman stepped with assurance to the edge of the veranda to greet the visitors, and it was Mrs. Janeway she first met and embraced.
"Marian Janeway! How I wish I could see you, to know if you have really changed!" cried Mrs. Hammond in the heartiest and most cheerful voice imaginable. It was easy to see from whom Rhoda had got her voice.
"I've grown fat—I can tell you that," sighed the Chicago woman. "And you—why, you are still as graceful as you were when you were a girl."
"Flatterer!" exclaimed Rhoda's mother, laughing. Then she seized upon Nan who chanced to come up the steps directly behind Mrs. Janeway.
"Who is this?" she cried. "Wait!" Her fingers ran quickly but lightly over Nan's countenance. She even felt her ears, and the hair where it fluffed over her brow, and traced the line of her well marked eyebrows. "Why!" she added with decision, "this is Nan Sherwood that I have heard so much about."
"Oh, Mrs. Hammond," gasped the girl, "how did you know?"
She looked up into the shining face of the blind woman and could scarcely believe that she was so afflicted. Mrs. Hammond's laugh was deep-throated and hearty, like Rhoda's own.