"I declare for't! 'Rill warn't sech an old maid then. She was right purty, if she had been teachin' school some time. Th' young men use ter buzz around her in them days.
"But when she broke off with Hopewell, she broke off with all. Hopewell was spleeny about it—ya-as, indeed, he was. He soon took up with 'Cinda—jest as though 'twas out o' spite. Anyhow, 'fore any of us knowed it, they'd gone over to Middletown an' got married.
"'Cinda Stone was a right weakly sort o' critter. Of course Hopewell was good to her," pursued Aunt 'Mira. "Hopewell Drugg is as mild as dishwater, anyhow. He'd be perlite to a stray cat."
Janice was interested—she could not help being. Miss Scattergood, it seemed to her, was a pathetic figure; and the girl from Greensboro was just at an age to appreciate a bit of romance. The gray, dusty man in the dark, little store, playing his fiddle to the child that could only hear the quivering minor tones of it, held a place in Janice's thought, too.
"What do you do Saturday mornings, Marty?" asked the visitor, at the breakfast table. Janice had already been to the Shower Bath and back, and the thrill of the early day was in her veins. Only a wolfish appetite had driven her indoors when she smelled the pork frying.
Marty was just lounging to his seat,—he was almost always late to breakfast,—and he shut off a mighty yawn to reply to his cousin:
"Jest as near like I please as kin be."
"Saturday afternoon, where I came from, is sort of a holiday; but Saturday morning everybody tries to make things nice about the yard—fix flower-beds, rake the yard, make the paths nice, and all that."
"Huh!" grunted Marty. "That's work."
"No, it isn't. It's fun," declared Janice, brightly.