"Miss Jerusha, look here!"
Miss Jerusha lifted her head, and, seeing Miss Georgia's flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, the evidence of one of her "tantrums," said:
"Well who hev you bin a-fightin' with now, marm?"
"I haven't been fighting with any one," said Georgia, impatiently, for a slight skirmish like this was nothing to pitched battle she called fighting; "but there's a boy that has sprained his ankle down on the beach, and his brother's bringing him here for you to fix it."
Now, Miss Jerusha, though not noted for her hospitality at any time, would not, perhaps, on an ordinary occasion make any objection to this beyond a few grumbles, but on this particular morning everything had gone wrong, and she was in an (even for her) unusually surly mood, so she turned round and sharply exclaimed:
"And do you suppose, you little good-for-nothing whipper-snapper, I keep an 'ospital for every shif'less scamp in the neighborhood? If you do, you are very much mistaken, that's all. If he's sprained his ankle, let him go sommer's else, for I vow to Sam he sha'n't come here!"
"He shall come here!" exclaimed Georgia, with one of her passionate stamps: "you see if he sha'n't. I told him he could come here, and he shall, too, in spite of you!"
"Why, you little impident hussy you!" said Miss Jerusha, flinging down her work and rising to her feet, "how dare you have the imperance to stand up and talk to me like that? We'll see whether he'll come here or not. You invited him here, indeed! And pray what right have you to invite anybody here, I want to know? You, a lazy, idle little vagabone, not worth your salt! Come here, indeed! I wish he may; if he doesn't go out faster than he came in it won't be my fault!"
"Just you try to turn him out, you cross, ugly old thing! If you do I'll—I'll kill you; I'll set fire to this hateful old hut, and burn it down! You see if I don't. There!"
The savage gleam of her eyes at that moment, her face white with concentrated passion, was something horrible and unnatural in one of her years. Miss Jerusha drew back a step, and interposed a chair between them in salutary dread of the little vixen's claw-like nails.