Coming across the yard from the "Spring-branch" was the slender figure of a girl.
She was not barefooted, but wore shoes and stockings, and instead of being lost in loose sack or slip-shod mother-hubbard, her slight waist was trimly belted.
While Newt stared at her, she, too, looked up and saw him. For a moment she seemed startled at the black-visaged apparition, but after a moment she coolly returned his glance, and disappeared into the house.
When the boy later on went to the door, the westering sun sent a long golden shaft into the primitive interior, down which the dust motes danced, although the corners remained somberly obscure. In the room were only the "women-folks"; his mother sitting huddled over her pipe; his sister lying idly stretched on one of the beds with an ill-natured frown in her eyes, and the strange girl. The strange girl sat, not near the cold hearth, where now there was no fire, but in the sun, and the sun fell upon and sparkled in her brown hair and awakened dull glints like the luster of polished mahogany. She was holding her lips rather tightly drawn, as in self-repression, and there was a mistiness about her eyes that hinted at unshed tears.
"I reckon," Newt's mother was saying in a spitefully hard voice, as the boy's figure darkened the door, "ye thinks sence ye went off ter school and got ter consartin' with them fotched-on teachers, thet ye're better'n what we be."
The girl made no reply, but she bent over the sewing in her lap, and her fingers trembled. Mrs. Rawlins looked up and, with a jerk of her head, announced for the benefit of her son:
"This here air Clem's gal, Minervy. I married a widderer." The last sentence was snapped out in a tone of deep complaining, from which one might infer that in the train of marrying a widower followed many melancholy consequences.
At that the girl raised her face and into it swept a sudden flush of anger. She looked challengingly at Newt and her eyes told him that, if she was silent under the shrewish heckling of the woman, she was quite ready to give him battle. But the boy had no intention of insulting her. He did not know that already she was finding herself in that most pathetic of all positions, the status of being just enough educated to be unplaced at home, and too little educated to be placed elsewhere. She had been thrown, by her father's second marriage, under the persecutions of a shrew, a jealous step-sister, and a century-old imbecile. She looked at Newt and reflected that his arrival added a murderer to the group. "Clem's gal" was longing for that different and more wholesome life over there at the college. But Newt had seen the look in her eyes and recognized that she like himself was here among people who offered no friendship. It was a rude bond of sympathy, and though she was "Clem's gal," and, in consequence, of the enemy, he rose to her defense.