"All in all it was 'bout the most successful entertainment we ever bed here to Bixby, and we made forty dollars clear, though the land knows we put work enough into it to make seventy-five! There's one thing certain, wherever that author goes readin' she won't find any place that'll do the thing up in the same style as the Winter Night Club did when it entertained her at Bixby!
"Must you go so soon, Mis' Strout? Well, it's ben real nice to see you and hear all the news from Milliken's Mills."
THE QUILT OF HAPPINESS
I
Riverboro, that generally assumed an indifferent and semi-recumbent attitude when it observed strangers, sat up and took notice the moment that Rebecca Rowena Randall arrived on the noon stage from up-country and alighted at the brick house on the main street of the village. Mrs. Perkins, the nearest neighbor, with her only daughter, Emma Jane, palpitating with interest beside her, watched the cautious descent of the little passenger from the stage and the particularly tempestuous tweak she gave her headgear as her feet touched the earth. Then they watched with equal interest the lifting of her hair trunk from the back of the stage by Jerry Cobb; the appearance of Miss Jane on the stone steps; and well at the rear, the tall, grim figure of Miranda Sawyer.
Mrs. Perkins could see Miranda's greeting in the shape of a bony finger directing the child to wipe her dusty feet on the mat; then the screen door of the brick house slammed behind her, and Rebecca was a member of the brick-house family and a citizen of Riverboro.
"Poor little mite!" sighed Mrs. Perkins.
"Can I go over and see her now?" asked Emma Jane, already cherishing hopes of intimacy.
"Of course you can't!" responded her mother briskly. "Do you s'pose Mirandy wants the house full o' comp'ny the minute Rebecca gits there?"