"Now, then, whoever you are, come in if you want to!"
It was the voice of a mortal child, and Miss Jerusha was re-assured. Thoroughly ashamed of herself, and provoked at having betrayed so much fear, she approached the open door, passed in, and it was closed after her.
"So I scared you, did I? Well, it serves you right, you know, for staring in people's windows," said the shrill little voice; and Miss Jerusha, looking down, saw the same small, thin, dark face, with its great, wild, glittering black eyes, long, tangled masses of coal-black hair, high, broad brow, and a slight lithe figure.
It was a strange, unique face for a child, full of slumbering power, pride, passion, strength, and invincible daring; but Miss Jerusha did not see this, and looking down only beheld an odd-looking, rather ugly child, of twelve or thirteen, or so, with what she regarded as an impudent, precocious gaze, disagreeable and unnatural in one so young.
"Little gal, don't be sassy," said Miss Jerusha, sharply: "you ought to hev more respect for your elders, and not stand there and give them such empidence. Pretty broughten you must hev got, I know—a sassy little limb."
The latter part of this address was delivered in a muttered soliloquy, as she pushed the hood back from her face and shook the snow off her cloak. The "little limb," totally unheeding the reprimand, still stood peering up in her face, scanning its iron lineaments with an amusing mixture of curiosity and impudence.
As Miss Jerusha again turned round and encountered the piercing stare of those great, dark, bright eyes fixed so unwinkingly on her face, she felt, for the first time in her life, perhaps, restless and uneasy under the infliction.
"My conscience! little gal, don't stare so! I 'clare to gracious I never see sich a child! I don't know what she looks like," said Miss Jerusha.
The latter sentence was not intended for the child's ears, but it reached those sharp little organs nevertheless, and, still keeping her needle-like gaze fixed on the wrinkled face of the spinster, she said:
"Well, if you don't, I know what you look like, anyway—I do!"