Bradish paused irresolutely, closing and unclosing his hands. But at that moment the door opened and a woman came in. Bradish crowded past her and went thumping down the stairs.
Mrs. Micajah Dunham, bolt upright in the middle of the seat of a rattly beach waggon and disdaining the support of the leather-covered back, even when the ledges of the Cove road danced her most vigorously, had with a directness typical of Mrs. Micajah Dunham driven straight to the gnawed hitching post in front of Brickett’s store. Mrs. Dunham always appeared to be a very rigid sort of person, but on this occasion there was extra rigidity about her, from the set of her jaw to the stiffness of her knee action, as she stepped down from the waggon. Looking neither right nor left, she ran the halter rope through the gnawed hitching post and walked up the outside stairs exactly in the middle, hands at her sides and neglecting the rain-bleached rail as she had disdained the seat-back. A bonnet trimmed with dust-spotted imitations of grapes framed her narrow face squarely, and a shawl appeared to pinch her shoulders together.
She sat down in the “blind-stagger” chair well to the edge, on account of the dust, at which her housewife’s eye glared in disfavour.
“Squire,” she said, with a directness of attack that took no account of his averted face, “I’ve come to consult you legally, and I’ve brought the dockyments.” She jerked herself up, crossed the room, and laid on his open book a sheet of rudely scalloped pink paper, on which were pasted hearts cut out of red and blue tissue.
“That’s almost the first to which I really was knowin’ the straight facts,” she went on. “But I’ve had a glimmer of an idea for some time. Oh, I tell you it ain’t come all to once, this thing ain’t!” The lawyer turned slowly, picked up the paper, holding it gingerly by the corner.
“Sit down, Esther,” he said quietly, “and we’ll see what we can make out of it.”
There were some lines of writing on the paper, and he read them aloud in dry, legal monotone, the woman greeting the sentiments with scornful sniffs:
“For those that love the world is bright;
And when it’s bright it is a sign
That some one’s eyes do shed the light;