Miss Annie Richards,
Snowdown,
Mass.
That was the direction, and the envelope was faced with black. Adah noticed this, together with the heavy seal of wax stamped with an initial; and she was taking the lost epistle to its rightful owner when Mrs. Richards met her, asking what she had.
"I found this beneath the curtain," Adah replied. "It's for Miss Anna; I'll take it to her, shall I?"
"Yes, yes—yes, yes; for Anna," and madam snatched eagerly at that letter from Charlie Millbrook.
Soon recovering herself, she said naturally: "I'll take it myself. Say, girl, what is your name, now that you are to work here? You won't mind righting up the parlors, I presume—sweeping and dusting them, before you go upstairs again?"
It was new business for Adah, sweeping parlors as a servant, but she did it without a murmur; and then, when her task was completed, stopped for a moment by a window, and looked out upon the town, wondering where Alice Johnson's home had been. The house where she once lived would seem like an old friend, she thought, just as Pamelia came in and joined her. At the same moment Adah's eye caught the cottage by the river, and her heart beat rapidly, for that seemed to answer Alice's description of her Snowdon home.
"Whose pretty place is that?" she asked, pointing it out to Pamelia, who replied:
"It was a Mrs. Johnson's, but she's dead, and Miss Alice has gone a long ways off. I wish you could see Miss Alice, the most beautiful and the best lady in the world. She and Miss Anna were great friends. She used to be up here every day, and the village folks talked some that she came to see the doctor. But my," and Pamelia's face was very expressive of contempt, "she wouldn't have him, by a great sight. He's going to be married, though, to a Kentucky belle, with a hundred or more negroes, they say, and mighty big feelin'. But she needn't bring none of her a'rs nor her darkies here!"
"When does she come?" Adah asked, and Pamelia answered:
"In the spring; so you needn't begin to dread her. Why, your face is white as paper," and rather familiarly Pamelia pinched Adah's marble cheek.