These things troubled her as she crossed the stream. Once ashore she ceased to think of them. Polycarp, with few words, slung the salmon on his back, and, leaving Ambrose to pious meditations and the canoe, indicated the ox-road to Rose, who went on in front.
After twenty minutes of swift walking, Rose came out of the wood-path into a clearing of some fifty acres, and at last to a cabin set in an inclosure. Here were a few beds of the commoner flowers and a squared-log house. The windows were open, the clean white muslin curtains pulled back, and on the ledges tomato-cans and a broken jug or two filled with that flower which grows best for the poor, the red geranium. On the south end of the cabin a Japanese ivy, given by Mrs. Lyndsay, had made a fair fight with the rigor of a Canadian winter and was part way up to the gable. Noticing the absence of dirt and of the litter of chips, rags, egg-shells, and bits of paper, so common where labor has all it can do to attend to the essential, Rose tapped on the open door, and then, turning, saw Mrs. Maybrook standing at the well. She came forward at once to meet her visitor.
“Why, I guess you must be Margaret Lyndsay’s daughter.”
Rose, a little taken aback by the familiar manner of this identification, perhaps showed it to this shrewd observer in something about her bearing as she said, “A pleasant evening after the rain,” and took the proffered hand. “Yes, I am Rose Lyndsay.”
“I’m never quite rid of my Quaker fashion of naming folks without their handles. Seems to get you nearer to people. Now, don’t you think so? Come in.”
Rose, as her host stepped aside, entered the cabin. It was bedroom, kitchen, and sitting-room all in one, like most of these rude homes, but it was absolutely clean, and just now, as the cooking was done out of doors, was cool and airy. Mrs. Maybrook was in a much-mended gown, and bore signs enough of contact with pots and pans. Still the great coils of hair were fairly neat, and the gray eyes shone clear and smiling. She made none of the apologies for her house or its furniture such as the poor are apt to make, nor yet for herself or her dress.
“Come in and sit down. I’m that glad to see you. Oh, Polycarp, is that you? And your father has sent me a salmon? My old man will like that. Put it in the brook, Polycarp.”
“But it is my fish,” said Rose. “I killed it and I wanted you to have it; my father had nothing to do with it, I am glad of a chance to thank you, Mrs. Maybrook, for—for all you were to my mother—all you did last summer when our dear Harry died.”
And this fine young woman, in her tailor-made London walking-gown, thereupon having got to the end of words, and having had this thing in mind for ten minutes, fell an easy victim to nature, so that her eyes filled as she spoke. When this came about, Dorothy became as easy a prey to the despotism of sympathetic emotion, and her tears, too, fell like ripe apples on a windy November day. Also, upon this, these two “fools of nature” looked at each other and smiled through their tears, which is a mysteriously explanatory and apologetic habit among rightly made women. After this they were in a way friends. The elder woman took the hand of the younger and said:
“When my last boy died, there was a woman I just hated, and she came and she cried. It makes a heap of matter who cries,—don’t it, now?”