With a cry of delight Maude wound her arms around the neck of her old nurse, whom she knew in a moment, though Janet had more difficulty in recognizing the little girl of other years in the womanly looking maiden before her.
"It beats all how you've changed," she said, "though your eyes and hair are the same," and she passed her hand caressingly over the short glossy curls. Then looking intently in Maude's face she continued. "You've grown handsome, child."
"No, no, not handsome, Janet; Nellie is the beauty of the house," and Maude shook her head mournfully, for on the subject of beauty she was a little sensitive, her sister always pronouncing her "a fright," and manifesting a most unamiable spirit if anyone complimented her in the least.
"What, that yaller-haired, white-face chit who went for you?" rejoined Janet. "No such thing; but tell me now of your marm. How sick is she, and what of the little boy? Is he much deformed?"
"Come in here," said Maude, leading the way into the parlor, and drawing a chair close to Janet, she told all she deemed it necessary to tell.
But the quick-witted Janet knew there was something more, and casting a scornful glance around the room she said: "You are a good girl, Maude; but you can't deceive an old girl like me. I knew by the tremblin' way you writ that somethin' was wrong, and started the first blessed morning after gettin' your letter. I was calculating to come pretty soon, anyway, and had all my arrangements made. So I can stay a good long spell—always, mebby—for I'm a widder now," and she heaved a few sighs to the memory of Mr. Joel Blodgett, who, she said, "had been dead a year," adding, in a whisper, "but there's one consolation—he willed me all his property," and she drew from her belt a huge silver time-piece, which she was in the habit of consulting quite often, by way of showing that "she could carry a watch as well as the next one."
After a little her mind came back from her lamented husband, and she gave Maude a most minute account of her tedious ride in a lumber-wagon from Canandaigua to Laurel Hill, for the stage had left when she reached the depot, and she was in too great a hurry to remain at the hotel until the next morning.
"But what of that doctor—do you like him?" she said at last, and Maude answered: "Never mind him now; let us see mother first, or rather let me see to her dinner," and she arose to leave the room.
"You don't like him," continued Janet, "and I knew you wouldn't; but your poor mother, I pity her. Didn't you say you was gettin' her something to eat? She's had a good time waitin', but I'll make amends by seein' to her dinner myself," and spite of Maude's endeavors to keep her back she followed on into the disorderly kitchen, from which Nellie had disappeared, and where old Hannah sat smoking her pipe as leisurely as if on the table there were not piles of unwashed dishes, to say nothing of the unswept floor and dirty hearth.
"What a hole!" was Janet's involuntary exclamation, to which Hannah responded a most contemptuous "Umph!" and thus was the war-cry raised on either side. "What was you goin' to git for your mother?" asked Janet, without deigning to notice the portly African, who smoked on in dignified silence.