“That wouldn’t suit me, thank you,” laughed Mrs. Evans; “you can hoe corn better than wipe dishes, and Mr. Brush has acres and acres of corn to hoe, and potatoes too: he’s making that old Sparrow farm pay.”
Joe did not know that he had been lost, but he began to feel very much found.
“I’m glad you went out to the well with that glass,” he said, as his hostess wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and tied the blue ribbons of a blue wool hood under her chin.
“I’m usually glad of kind things I do; I suppose that’s one reason I do them.”
Joe unlatched the gate, holding it open for her to pass through, then pushed it shut; Beauty and this woman seemed to belong to the same order of creaturehood; the woman’s eyes were like Beauty’s, soft, and big and brown, and they answered you. She took his hand and drew it under her arm in a sort of comradeship, and then they went on, the woman and the boy, to find the gate that would swing open into a world of which it had never entered the boy’s heart to dream.
The gate was shut and a man in shirt-sleeves with a pipe in his mouth was standing on the mysterious and happy side of it resting his elbows on the pickets, and, attracted by voices, looking up the road in the starlight towards the two figures.
“You stay here, Joe—that’s Mr. Brush. I’ll tell him all your story.”
“My story?” repeated Joe, in amazement.
“You didn’t know you had any,” she laughed. “Well, folks don’t usually until it is all lived through. I didn’t know I had any girlhood until I married and lost it.”
“I haven’t lost anything,” said Joe, bewildered.