And the more he examined her the stranger did her aspect seem. She was evidently a woman of seventy or upward, and it struck him that she looked haggard and ill. Her grayish-white hair hung untidily about a thin, bony face; the eyes, hollow and wavering, infected the spectator with their own distress; yet the distress was so angry that it rather repelled than appealed. Her dress was quite out of keeping with the labourer's cottage in which she stood. It was a shabby blue silk, fashionably cut, and set off by numerous lockets and bangles.
She smiled scornfully at Barron's questions.
"A lodger? Well, I daresay I am. I'm John's mother."
"His mother?" said Barron, astonished. "I didn't know he had a mother alive." But as he spoke some vague recollection of Theresa's talk in the morning came back upon him.
The strange person in the doorway looked at him oddly.
"Well, I daresay you didn't. There's a many as would say the same. I've been away this eighteen year, come October."
Barron, as she spoke, was struck with her accent, and recalled her mention of "the cars."
"Why, you've been in the States," he said.
"That's it—eighteen year." Then suddenly, pressing her hand to her forehead, she said angrily: "I don't know what you mean. What do you come bothering me for? I don't know who you are—and I don't know nothing about your trees. Come in and sit down. John'll be in directly."
She held the door open, and Barron, impelled by a sudden curiosity, stepped in. He thought the woman was half-witted; but her silk dress, and her jewellery, above all her sudden appearance on the scene as the mother of a man whom he had always supposed to be alone in the world, with three motherless, neglected children, puzzled him.