"I'll leave the whole thing in your hands," said Ann, and she moved towards the rear door of her house. "Now"—and her tone was more joyful than it had been for years—"come in and sit down."
"No, I can't; I must hurry on back home," said the visitor. "I must get ready to go; Pete wants to make an early start."
"You know you'll have plenty of time all this evening to stuff things in that carpet-bag of yours." Ann laughed, and her friend remarked that it was the first smile and joke she had heard from Ann Boyd since their girlhood together.
"Well, I will go in, then," said Mrs. Waycroft. "I love to see you the way you are now, Ann. It does my heart good."
But the mood was gone. Ann was serious again. They sat in the sitting-room chatting till the people who had been to meeting began to return homeward along the dusty road. Among them, in Sam Hemingway's spring wagon, with its wabbling wheels and ragged oil-cloth top, were Jane and her daughter Virginia, neither of whom looked towards the cottage as they passed.
"I see Virginia's got a new hat," commented Mrs. Waycroft. "Her mother raked and scraped to get it; her credit's none too good. I hear she's in debt up to her eyes. Every stick of timber and animal down to her litter of pigs—even the farm tools—is under mortgage to money-lenders that won't stand no foolishness when pay-day comes. I saw two of 'em, myself, looking over her crop the other day and shaking their heads at the sight of the puny corn and cotton this dry spell. But she'd have the hat for Virginia if it took the roof from over her head. Her very soul's bound up in that girl. Looks like she thinks Virginia's better clay than common folks. They say she won't let her go with the Halcomb girls because their aunt had that talk about her."
"She's no better nor no worse, I reckon," said Ann, "than the general run of girls."
"There goes Langdon Chester on his prancing horse," said Mrs. Waycroft. "Oh, my! that was a bow! He took off his hat to Virginia and bent clean down to his horse's mane. If she'd been a queen he couldn't have been more gallant. For all the world, like his father used to be to high and low. I'll bet that tickled Jane. I can see her rear herself back, even from here. I wonder if she's fool enough to think, rascal as he is, that Langdon Chester would want to marry a girl like Virginia just for her good looks."
"No, he'll never marry her," Ann said, positively, and her face was hard, her eyes set in a queer stare at her neighbor. "He isn't the marrying sort. If he ever marries, he'll do it to feather his nest."
The visitor rose to go, and Ann walked with her out to the gate. Mrs. Waycroft was wondering if she would, of her own accord, bring up the subject of their recent talk, but she did not. With her hand on the gate, she said, however, in a non-committal tone: