Brown stared at her.
"Why, that's only an automobile horn—and their tire just blew out," he began, astonished.
But she sprang past him, calling, "Jack! Jack! Where are you?" and he heard the door fly open and her childish cry of terror outside in the sunshine.
The next second he followed her, running through the hall and out through the door to the porch; and at the same moment a big red touring car came to a standstill before the house; the chauffeur descended to put on a new tire, and a young girl in motor duster and hood sprang lightly from the tonneau to the tangled grass. As she turned to look at the house she caught sight of him.
Brown took an uncertain step forward; and she came straight toward him.
Neither spoke as they met face to face. He looked at her, passed his hand over his eyes, bewildered, and looked again.
She was slim and red-haired and slightly freckled, and her mouth was perhaps a shade large, and it curled slightly at the corners, and her eyes were quite perfectly made except that one was hazel-brown and the other a hazel-grey.
She looked at him, and it seemed to him as though, in the fearless gravity of her regard, somewhere, somehow—perhaps in the curled corners of her lips, perhaps in her pretty and unusual eyes—there lurked a little demon of laughter. Yet it could not be so—there were only serenity and a child's direct sweetness in her gaze.
"I suppose you have come to look at this old-time place?" she said. "People often come. You are perfectly welcome."
And, as he made no answer: