When the rider, and the driver reached the yard, Mr. Lindsay, innocent of the two pairs of critical eyes that watched him from the kitchen window, turned back the top of the buggy carefully, and with a hand that all the hard work in the world could not make other than gentle, assisted Miss Lucy to alight.
"Jest watch him, will ye?" Mrs. Doggett inveighed: "a handlin' Miss Lucy like she wuz aigs! Hain't he a puttin' on a good pious face, and him what he is, now! You hain't heerd I reckon, about him a goin' to Owensboro ever' onct in a while?" She lowered her voice to a meaning whisper.
"No!" Miss Nancy waited expectant.
"Well, you've heerd tell o' married men with big famblies a passin' off fer single men, hain't you, afore today, and ever' onct in a while a sneakin' off to see their wife and childern?" With this last pointed remark, Mrs. Doggett opened the side door of the kitchen.
"No, thank you, Miss Nancy, I can't stay nary 'nother minute," she declared in a tone of regret: "jest tell Miss Lucy fer me I'm still a lookin' fer her, and both of you come down real soon!" The door closed behind her, leaving Miss Nancy in anything but an amiable state of mind. At the buggy-house in the corner of the back yard, Mrs. Doggett encountered Mr. Lindsay putting away the buggy, and his saddle, and greeted him effusively.
"Eph's been a lookin' fer you down, Mr. Lindsay," she tendered him in smiling farewell, as Mr. Lindsay courteously brushed the snow aside and opened the gate for her, "but you're a flyin' too high fer us now, I reckon!"
Late that afternoon, when Mr. Lindsay took the milk-buckets from Miss Lucy's hand, and went with her to the barn lot, to assist her at the milking, as he had done each time since the beginning of his stay with the Jameses, Miss Nancy stood looking after him with a rigid air of offended propriety. Mrs. Doggett's whisper, suggesting vague possibilities of evil, had been accepted with due allowance by Miss Nancy, but for many days, a worm had found an abiding place in her bosom, and the other information Mrs. Doggett had given her to which she could give credence, fed this worm into a mighty thing that bit her heart cruelly.
She angrily watched Miss Lucy and her aid, as they moved about the barn-yard, to the serious hindering of the supper preparations. On her second unnecessary trip to the sitting-room, she threw the door open wide.
"Jest look!" she sneered. "Jest look, Pa! How does that look, him and her out there a milkin' together? Ef I was you, Pa, I'd stop it!"
"Hit hain't modest lookin'," agreed the old man: "Lucy'd orter know better'n to allow that. She'd aggervate the patience o' Job with her foolishness. I sha'n't let her milk no more while he's here!"