eather. Her face was brown
and wrinkled, and her bright eyes flashed restlessly, deep in their
sockets. Two front teeth were conspicuously missing; and her faded hair
was blown in wisps about her face. Jim performed the introduction, and
Annie held out her hand. It was a pretty hand, delicately gloved in dove
color. The woman took it in her own, and after she had shaken it, held
it for a silent moment, looking at it. Then she almost threw it from
her. The eyes which she lifted to scan the bright young face above
her had something like agony in them. Annie blushed under this fierce
scrutiny, and the woman, suddenly conscious of her demeanor, forced a
smile to her lips.

"I'll come out an' see yeh," she said, in cordial tones. "May be, as a
new housekeeper, you'll like a little advice. You've a nice place, an' I
wish yeh luck."

"Thank you. I'm sure I'll need advice," cried Annie, as they drove off.
Then she said to Jim, "Who is that old woman?"

"Old woman? Why, she ain't a day over thirty, Mis' Dundy ain't."

Annie looked at her husband blankly. But he was already talking of
something else, and she asked no more about the woman, though all the
way along the road the face seemed to follow her. It might have been
this that caused the tightening about her heart. For some way her
vivacity had gone; and the rest of the ride she asked no questions, but
sat looking straight before her at the northward stretching road, with
eyes that felt rather than saw the brown, bare undulations, rising
every now and then clean to the sky; at the side, little famished-looking
houses, unacquainted with paint, disorderly yards, and endless reaches
of furrowed ground, where in summer the corn had waved.

The horses needed no indication of the line to make them turn up a
smooth bit of road that curved away neatly 'mid the ragged grasses.
At the end of it, in a clump of puny scrub oaks, stood a square little
house, in uncorniced simplicity, with blank, uncurtained windows staring
out at Annie, and for a moment her eyes, blurred with the cold, seemed
to see in one of them the despairing face of the woman with the wisps of
faded hair blowing about her face.

"Well, what do you think of it?" Jim cried, heartily, swinging her down
from her high seat, and kissing her as he did so. "This is your home,
my girl, and you are as welcome to it as you would be to a palace, if I
could give it to you."

Annie put up her hands to hide the trembling of h