“Oh, Jim, see! A girl!”
Their little pretense at quarreling—for it was only a pretense—was stopped by the appearance of a little girl on the portico of the great house.
She looked quite small to them at first, standing among the great pillars that ran up the front of the house, but as she walked on down the old brick walk toward the gateway, they saw that she was almost as tall as Azalea, and quite a little heavier. She was all russet brown—hair, eyes, frock, stockings and shoes, and in her arms she carried a little silky dog with long ears and wistful, bulging eyes.
“We ought to go away,” whispered Azalea. “We’ve no business to stand staring in at other folks’s yards like this. It ain’t polite.”
But though she said this, she did not move an inch, and as for Jim, he stood with his mouth open, watching that girl dance down the long brick walk between the box hedges.
Suddenly she saw the children and stopped. Her eyes rested on Jim a moment and she seemed to smile at his kind, freckled, jolly phiz. Then she saw Azalea and the look in her face changed to one of deeper interest. Azalea, standing slender and straight there in her clean blue frock, with her gray eyes shining and her long hair beautifully braided, certainly was good to look at. So the girl came on, not dancing now, but hastening along as if bent on business.
“How do you do?” she said sweetly, blushing a little with shyness.
“I’m very well, thank you,” said Azalea. “How are you?”
Jim made a noise in his throat to show that he meant well, but no one could tell what words he was trying to say.
“Do you live near here?” the little girl inquired.