“Will you come with me?” he asked in patient exasperation.
“Yes,” and she stepped into the buggy.
He was in a wretched humor; but she was in one so gay, so light-hearted, that she gradually charmed him out of it.
Then, having yielded, he fell into an opposite humor, for he had long ago given up as impracticable the transparent fiction that he had ceased to love her with his former devotion.
“I am glad that we have arrived,” said Stargarde laughing and blushing, as Polypharmacy of his own accord stopped short on the snowy, country road before a dull red farmhouse flanked by a yellow barn.
Camperdown, splashing through snow and water in his big, rubber boots, opened a long gate and looked at Polypharmacy, who accepted the mute invitation to come in and be tied to a “hitching post.”
Stargarde walked up the little path which in summer time was bordered by flowers, and tapped softly at the door. A neighbor opened it and bestowed on her sundry confidences in half-tones with regard to the sick man, whose mother, she said was “clean distracted.”
They sat for some time in the old-fashioned kitchen of the house, by an open fireplace in which sticks of wood burned and sputtered in a subdued way, till the farmer’s wife came in from the sickroom, tears running down her cheeks. The doctor was going to stay a little while to observe her son’s symptoms, she said, and she begged that Miss Turner would wait for him as the roads were too bad for her to walk home.
The neighbor rose, and busied herself in drawing a many-legged table from the corner of the room, spreading a white cloth on it, and putting deftly in their places a number of blue, willow-patterned dishes. When everything was in order on the table, she approached the fireplace, and swinging toward her the crane suspended over the blaze, poured boiling water from a teakettle hanging to it into a brown teapot that she placed in a corner of the brick hearth.
Refusing all entreaties to stay and partake of the meal, by saying that she must return to her family, she took leave of Stargarde, of the farmer’s wife, and of the farmer himself, who at that moment came in.