There was the sound of a gate clanging and the chime of voices. A dog growled and then broke into a bark of welcome. The voices came nearer to the door. Joe rose to open it. The mother put her head on one side to listen.
"Do you know who that is, Willie John?" she asked.
"No," Grant answered, "I do not."
"It 's Eunice Doran," she said. She waited an instant. A smile crept over her face. "Larry Doran's daughter, from beyond the hill."
"Oh, to be sure; I remember her," Grant smiled back.
Of course he did—a lank, gray-eyed girl, with a habit of staring you out of countenance. The last time he had seen her she was fifteen, with long arms and legs that seemed eternally in the way; and he recalled, with a smile, how in those days he had been a little in love with her, and they had passed many queer, awkward moments together.
A funny, pathetic thing! And as he thought of it a shutter in his mind opened and he saw again the girl he had left on the stoop in Schermerhorn Street, with her chic way and flashing eyes.
He wondered what she would think if she knew he had once had a boyish affair with this simple thing from his own townland; and he blushed in imagining her teasing laughter.
He warmed with a glow of pride as he thought of her,—of Miss Levine, as he somehow always called her to himself,—of her marvelous clothes, of her manicured hands and wonderful eyebrows, of her appreciation of the latest effort of a cinematograph comedian, and her up-to-dateness with the last flivver joke. He smiled, too, as he thought of the wonder with which this poor country girl would regard the metropolitan divinity.
She came into the room slowly; and, though he could distinguish little of her features or form, he felt a sense of shock, for somehow he had expected a lanky, overgrown girl with arms and hands like the awkward legs of a foal—and what he saw was a tall woman, as tall as he, who moved with the slow dignity of a queen.