Vesper stopped the negro, and bought as many nuts at five cents apiece as he and Bidiane could carry. Then, trying to make her smile by balancing one on the saddle of his wheel, he walked slowly beside her.
Bidiane solemnly watched him. She would not talk, she would not smile, but she cheerfully dropped her load when one of his cocoanuts rolled in the ditch, and, at the expense of a scratched face from an inquisitive rose-bush that bent over to see what she was doing, she restored it to him.
"Your cheek is bleeding," said Vesper.
"No odds," she remarked, with Indian-like fortitude, and she preceded him into a grassy dooryard, that was pervaded by a powerful smell of frying doughnuts.
Mirabelle Marie, her fat, good-natured young aunt, stood in the kitchen doorway with a fork in her hand, and seeing that the stranger was English, she beamed a joyous, hearty welcome on him.
"Good day, sir; you'll stop to supper? That's right. Shove your wheel ag'in that fence, and come right in. Biddy, git the creamer from the well and give the genl'man a glass of milk. You won't?—All right, sir, walk into the settin'-room. What! you'd rather set under the trees? All right. My man's up in the barn, fussin' with a sick cow that's lost her cud. He's puttin' a rind of bacon on her horns. What d'ye say, Biddy?"—this latter in an undertone to the little girl, who was pulling at her dress. "This is the Englishman from Boston—sakerjé!" and, dropping her fork, she wiped her hands on her dress and darted out to offer Vesper still more effusive expressions of hospitality.
He smiled amiably on her, and presently she returned to the kitchen, silly and distracted in appearance, and telling Bidiane that she felt like a hen with her head cut off. The stranger who was to do so much for them had come. She could have prostrated herself in the dust before him. "Scoot, Biddy, scoot," she exclaimed; "borry meat of some kind. Go to the Maxwells or to the Whites. Tell 'em he's come, and we've got nothin' but fish and salt pork, and they know the English hate that like pizen. And git a junk of butter with only a mite of salt in it. Mine's salted heavy for the market. And skip to the store and ask 'em to score us for a pound of cheese and some fancy crackers."
Bidiane ran away, and, as she ran, her ill humor left her, and she felt herself to be a very important personage. Vivaciously and swiftly she exclaimed, "He's come!" to several children whom she met, and with a keen and exquisite sense of pleasure looked back to see them standing open-mouthed in the road, impressed in a most gratifying way by the news communicated.