With a hand that slightly trembled, both from weakness and nervous irritability, the tall old man, leaning on his stick, his bald head shining in the December sun, held open the side gate of the yard, while his daughter, measuring the space between the white-washed gate posts with an anxious eye, drove cautiously in.
To a person of fifty years, agility is ordinarily a stranger. Miss Lucy, carefully protecting her new black etamine dress skirt from the wheel, climbed slowly out of the buggy, and gathered up the numerous bundles from the floor of the vehicle. Then, while her father fumbled with the straps of the harness, she lingered for a moment, watching him.
"Pa," she ventured in the apologetic manner of one who expects a rebuff, "spose'n you let me help take out old Maud. I'm afraid you'll hurt your bad knee."
"Naw, I won't," answered her father testily: "you'd better jest take them thar bundles in the house, and put on your ever' day clothes and holp Nancy about the dinner! Nancy's been a workin' hard all the time you've been a gaddin' about town."
When Miss Lucy came out of the front bedroom into the sitting-room behind it, an imaginary speck of dust on a pane of glass in the door of the tall cherry "press" filled with gay-colored dishes, caught her eye. She rubbed the glass carefully with a corner of her apron, and catching up the little hearth-broom, stooped to brush up a microscopic cinder that had fallen from the grate on the green and red striped rag carpet. Her sister greeted her with a look of reproach.
"Do you think, Lucy, I ain't done no cleanin' up while you was gone?" she asked.
Both the Misses James were alike tall, but what was angularity in the uncompromisingly erect figure of Miss Nancy, who had never known a sick day, was slenderness and delicacy in her elder sister. Miss Nancy's rugged face found no redeeming beauty in her eyes, which were gray and cold as the foundation stones of the house, and carried in their depths a perpetual look of rebuke to the world in general, and to her sister in particular; but the irregularity of Miss Lucy's features seemed akin to beauty in the light of her dark-blue eyes, shining with loving kindness,—eyes that despite their owner's years, held a look of singularly childlike innocence, and a sort of timidity that appeals to the chivalry of men.
According to Mrs. Doggett, the James' nearest neighbor, for whom spinsterhood in one she did not admire required a just reproof, but in a friend necessitated an explanation and an apology, "Miss Nancy's never had any notice as I ever heerd tell of, but to the best o' my belief, Miss Lucy'd 'a' been married long ago, ef hit hadn't 'a' been fer skeer o' them old thengs,"—the "old thengs" in question being Miss Nancy and her father.
"How do you like Pa's overcoat, Nancy?" asked Miss Lucy, opening the great bundle she had laid on the middle star of the sitting-room bed, and holding up the garment. Miss Nancy looked at the neat gray beaver with cold disapproval.
"Why'n't you git black?" she demanded: "you wanted a black one, didn't you, Pa?"