“There—there he is! There is the boy!” She pointed to the best portrait of Bully Preep. “He always called after me, the little devil.”
Matt’s heart beat excitedly, his face crimsoned. But his strange visitor’s next words threw him back into uneasy chaos.
“Oh, but everybody is saying how scandalous it is! with his wife only six months in her grave. Look how long Peter and I have waited. Most of the girls in the village get engaged half a dozen times; they don’t know what love is, they don’t know anything, they’ve got no education. But I’ve only been engaged once, and I’m so thirsty. And you’ve got her too, the little angel! Everybody is saying how hard it is for her! And yet they all go to the ball. May they dance till they drop, the hypocrites!”
“What are you sayin’?” faltered Matt. “Hard for Ruth Hailey? Why, she’s only a little girl.”
“She isn’t a little girl. Little girls run after me. I know all the little girls. She’s a little angel! Just as you’ve pictured her. Give me some more water.”
This time Matt surrendered the dipper to her.
“Thank you, Cousin Matt,” she said, and drank feverishly. But seeing that she was about to dip again, he placed himself between her and the barrel. She turned away with a marvellously dexterous movement considering her cumbrous foot-gear, and dipped the ladle into the seething caldron instead. But Matt seized her arm and stayed her from extracting the dipper.
“You’ll scald yourself,” he said.
“Let go my arm,” she cried, threateningly. “How dare you touch me—you are not Peter!”
“You mustn’t drink any more.”