The sound of voices, one unmistakably Mr. Dugald’s, disturbed Sidney’s musings. She thrust “Dorothea” into the secret shelf and locked it. Then she peeped out of the window.
Mr. Dugald and Miss Letty Vine approached down the narrow path of hard sand straight toward the willows. Sidney’s first impulse was to call to them; in the next moment she realized that they had no intention of climbing to Top Notch. Miss Vine wore heavy gloves on her hands and carried a trowel and a basket and was making little jumps here and there among the weeds in search of “specimens.”
Sidney sat very still and watched her. She thought Miss Letty the most interesting person, anyway. She always looked like the figurehead of a ship come to life, as Mr. Dugald had described her. She was very tall and bony, with huge bones that made lumps in her shoulders and elbows and even at her knees; her temples protruded and her cheek-bones and her jaw. She had long fingers with prominent knuckles.
Miss Letty always wore a style of dress that she had evolved for herself long ago and that was plainly built for comfort rather than style or beauty. She held any grace of trimming as “froppery” and scorned it, going always unadorned. She wore her “learning” just as she wore her clothes. That she had gone to school in Boston and studied music there no one would ever know from anything she said. One just thought of Miss Letty as being born with knowledge, the way she was born capable. “Capable from the cradle,” Aunt Achsa sometimes said.
Everyone liked Miss Letty in spite of the bones and the sharp tongue and the freakish dresses, and no one knew exactly why; it might have been her eyes which were kindly and had little twinkles deep-set within their irises, or her way of knowing the thing to do and going ahead and doing it. Everyone respected Miss Letty and acknowledged her worth at once.
Now Mr. Dugald was lounging against one of the rotting timbers of the house-that-had-been and sketching Miss Letty on the pad which he always carried in the pocket of his old coat. He thought Miss Letty most interesting, too. He spent considerable time at her house and often took long walks with her.
While Sidney watched, Miss Letty sat down stiffly by Mr. Dugald’s side and looked with interest at the sketch.
“That’s about the thousandth one you’ve made, isn’t it? And you can’t seem to get any of them bad enough.”
“I can’t get into it what I want,” Dugald Allan laughed, tearing off the sheet and crumpling it in his hand. “You see I feel something about you that I haven’t been able yet to put on canvas. But I will some day. Then I’ll know I have gotten somewhere.”
Miss Letty considered his words as though they were of some one quite apart from herself.