Everything was warm and sweet and very still. Only the invisible choir of crickets made silence musical, and a flaming torch of goldenrod beside the crumbling old stone wall seemed ready to light the summer’s funeral pyre. Not that Lucy Waring thought of it in just that way, but possibly Stella’s dreams and fancies might have been so translated.
Perhaps it had not been quite polite to leave the house so abruptly before their guest had taken her leave. She had forgotten … ought she to go back at once? But where could the child be? she wondered. As she stood hesitating, a low, sweet call made her look quickly up, and next instant a girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and dropped lightly upon its feet.
A girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and dropped lightly upon its feet. [Page 16.]
Hair of a dense blue-black was neatly braided and tied up with red ribbon that matched the red plaid in her irreproachable gingham frock; a faint sort of underglow warmed the smooth, brown skin; a something spirited about the carriage of the well-shaped head and a singular directness in the glance of the soft, black eyes were the first things you noticed. Surely, this was no ordinary child.
“Oh, mother, mother!” she cried, impulsively throwing her arms around the little lady’s neck. “Isn’t it beautiful? Oh, I wish we had real grass and apple-trees in Dakota, don’t you? It wasn’t wrong to come out here, was it? Don’t say it was wrong, mother! Can’t this be my House to come out to when Miss Sophia doesn’t want me? I feel as if she didn’t want me; her house seems to push me right out somehow. And I’m terribly afraid of going to school; I’ve been thinking how perhaps the other girls won’t want me either.”
“You must be brave, darling,” quavered poor Mrs. Waring. “Remember, this strangeness will all wear off very soon.”
“Oh, I shall be brave,” burst out Yellow Star, letting her slender arms fall at her sides, and holding her jet-crowned head higher than ever. “My people have always been brave, you know—so of course I have to be! And nobody at all will ever know how afraid I am … nobody but you, mother.
“That yellow-haired girl in the pink dress that just went up the straight path to the front door … there she comes down again with the stout lady with shiny black beads all over her bonnet and her tight, black waist—she looks just like some kind of large, shining beetle, doesn’t she?—well, my heart beats so it shakes me all over when I even think of going up and speaking to that girl in pink! I think she’s perfectly beautiful—and I’m terribly afraid of her—but she’ll never guess how I feel. There’s one thing I have to tell you, though,” she added in a more subdued voice. “I find I can’t call Miss Sophia ‘Aunt’ any more. Do you think you’ll mind very much, mother? I’m almost certain she can’t be any real relation.”