The group dispersed, many glad to have enjoyed such a genuine sensation, Mrs. Stillman declaring to the neighbor and the landlady she hadn't had such a skeer since the time he was took in the dead o' night with bleedin' at the lungs, and not a doctor in ten mile, and every minute like to be his last, so it was.
The artist followed Miss Gill from the spot. She picked up her basket beside the photographic car, her face so sublimated it seemed never to have known any other look.
"I didn't understand human nature," she confessed to the photographer, who had entered his car and again appeared at the window above her. "That fellow has the poetry in him that I can't write out. I'm afraid I'm going to cry."
The artist held down his sketch-book to her. Dabbing back her tears with one hand, she took it with the other and exclaimed at once, "Why, you've sketched me!"
"When a man like that dares so much for home happiness in this world, I think I can dare a little, poor, struggling dog as I am. I called that a while ago the picture of my wife; and it shall be—my woman," infusing the idiom of his native State with its primitive, tender meaning.
She handed back the book, and he took it, with her hand.
"Do you dare?" trembled the girl with a laugh, mindful that all Fairfield was out.
"I think I do," he replied, smiling also as he followed her eyes toward a group proceeding down the railroad—"even in spite of that."
Mrs. Mallston was walking beside her husband, making a display of ankle-bone under her scant calico wrapper, her sun-bonnet flapping to her nose, the four juveniles able to walk dangling from her fingers or drapery. Mallston, straight as a hickory tree, carried his youngest on his bosom, patting its cheek with his horny, potato-scented palm.
M.H. Catherwood.