“No, I thank you,” said Ruth, stiffly. “Good-night.”
“Good-night,” and she went.
“Why, she don’t like us as much as she does them!” said the girl to herself, filled with amazement at this revolution of all her ideas. “Well, Larry’s right. Miss Cary is charming,” she reflected.
As she dropped off to sleep she could hear the hum of voices below, where Dr. Cary and her father were keeping up their discussion of the war. And as she was still trying to make out what they were saying, the sun came streaming into her room through a broken shutter and woke her up.
CHAPTER XXV
THE TRICK-DOCTOR
Ruth Welch on awaking, still, perhaps, had some little feeling about what she understood to be her hosts’ attitude on the question of Northerners, but when on coming downstairs she was greeted on the veranda by her young hostess, who presented her with a handful of dewy roses, and looked as sweet as any one of them, or all of them put together, her resentment vanished, and, as she expressed it to her mother afterward, she “went over to the enemy bag and baggage.” As she looked out through the orchard and across over the fields, glowing after the last night’s rain, there came to Ruth for the first time that tender feeling which comes to dwellers in the country, almost like a sweet odor, and compensates them for so much besides, and which has made so many a poet, whether he has written or not. Her hostess took her around the yard to show her her rose-bushes, particularly one which she said had come from one which had always been her mother’s favorite at their old home.
“We have not always lived here?” Her voice had a little interrogation in it as she looked at Ruth, much as if she had said, “You know?” And just as if she had said it, Ruth answered, softly, “Yes, I know.”