So, when the two young figures were seen sauntering along the road towards the store, there were lookers-on enough to regard them with interest.
“Now he’s my idee of a ’ristycrat,” remarked Mr. Doty, with the manner of a connoisseur. “Kinder tall an’ slim, an’ high-sperrity lookin’; Sheby’s a gal, but she’s got it too—thet thar sorter racehorse look. Now, hain’t she?”
“I want you to see the store and the people in it,” Sheba was saying. “It’s my home, you know. Uncle Tom took me there the day after I was born. I used to play on the floor behind the counter and near the stove, and all those men are my friends.”
Rupert had never before liked anything so much as he liked the simple lovingness of this life of hers. As she knew the mountains, the flowers, and the trees, she knew and seemed known by the very cows and horses and people she saw.
“That’s John Hutton’s old gray horse,” she had said as she caught sight of one rider in the distance. “That is Billy Neil’s yoke of oxen,” at another time. “Good-morning, Mrs. Stebbins,” she called out, with the prettiest possible cheer, to a woman in an orange cotton skirt as she passed on the road. “It seems to me sometimes,” she said to Rupert, “as if I belonged to a family that was scattered over miles and lived in scores of houses. They all used to tell Uncle Tom what would disagree with me when I was cutting my teeth.”
They mounted the steps of the porch, laughing the light, easy laugh of youth, and the loiterers regarded them with undisguised interest and admiration. In her pink cotton frock, and blooming like a rose in the shade of her frilled pink sunbonnet, Sheba was fair to see. Rupert presented an aspect which was admirably contrasting. His cool pallor and dense darkness of eyes and hair seemed a delightful background to her young tints of bloom.
“Thet thar white linen suit o’ his’n,” Mr. Doty said, “might hev been put on a-purpose to kinder set off her looks as well as his’n.”
It was to Mr. Doty Sheba went first.
“Jake,” she said, “this is my cousin Mr. Rupert De Willoughby from Delisleville.”
“Mighty glad to be made ’quainted, sir,” said Jake. “Tom’s mightily sot up at yer comin’.”