“I don’t know,” she said, troubled, “what Aunt ’Cretia’s goin’ to think. I mean about your coming with me.”
He raised his head.
“What about me coming with you?” he demanded.
Before the clear candor of his eyes, her own fell.
“She’ll think the truth,” he blazed, “or I’ll burn the house down!”
At this they both laughed, and now it was she who was feeling a dim shame, as if from some high standard of his, she had been the one to vary.
At the intersection of two paved roads, whose sidewalks were grass-grown, in their long waiting for footsteps, stood the house which they had been seeking. It was of dullish blue clapboards whose gabled ends were covered with red-brown toothed shingles. The house was too high for its area, and a hideous porch of cement blocks and posts looked like a spreading cow-catcher. On a clothes line, bed blankets and colored quilts were flapping, as if they were rejoicing in their one legitimate liberty from privacy.
Everywhere, on the porch, and on the scrubby lawn, and within the open door, stood packing boxes. The leap of alarm which Lory felt at sight of them was not allayed by the unknown woman in blue calico, with swathed head, who bent over the box in the hall.
At Lory’s question, the woman stared.