"I didn't mean this, at all," she returned, her lovely face sparkling with tears and smiles both at once. In her heart she felt that it was her nature, not his, which the future might change.
Yet, when they concluded to walk on to the store, she looked about with a sense of responsibility and an eye to changes to come, while he—his face flushed with happiness—lounged beside her in the old indolent way—unreproved.
[APPLE BLOSSOMS] [8]
In the clean, large kitchen of a Virginia farm-house sat an old woman alone, knitting. She had been pretty once; fifty years ago that wrinkled yellow skin had been called "creamy," and the scant gray hair drawn back under the plain cap had been a shower of brown curls. And she had coquetted with Judge Holt and turned away from him at the last to marry plain Nathan Bennett, living with him in rare contentment for two-score years, and then coming to spend the remnant of her days with her daughter Ann. Now Ann, too, was gone, and only the children were left; Ben and Nancy, and her own adopted child, Lura Ann.
She smoothed down her neat gray cashmere gown, which had been her "second best" dress since Ann's death, and leaned back more comfortably
against the cushioned surface of the splint rocking-chair.