Miranda was in the room, gave Jane much secret joy; there was something
about them that stirred her spinster heart--they were so gay, so
appealing, so un-Sawyer-, un-Riverboro-like. The longer Rebecca lived in
the brick house the more her Aunt Jane marveled at the child. What made
her so different from everybody else. Could it be that her graceless
popinjay of a father, Lorenzo de Medici Randall, had bequeathed her some
strange combination of gifts instead of fortune? Her eyes, her brows,
the color of her lips, the shape of her face, as well as her ways and
words, proclaimed her a changeling in the Sawyer tribe; but what an
enchanting changeling; bringing wit and nonsense and color and delight
into the gray monotony of the dragging years!

There was frost in the air, but a bright cheery sun, as Rebecca walked
decorously out of the brick house yard. Emma Jane Perkins was away over
Sunday on a visit to a cousin in Moderation; Alice Robinson and Candace
Milliken were having measles, and Riverboro was very quiet. Still, life
was seldom anything but a gay adventure to Rebecca, and she started
afresh every morning to its conquest. She was not exacting; the Asmodean
feat of spinning a sand heap into twine was, poetically speaking, always
in her power, so the mile walk to the pink-house gate, and the tryst
with freckled, red-haired Clara Belle Simpson, whose face Miss Miranda
said looked like a raw pie in a brick oven, these commonplace incidents
were sufficiently exhilarating to brighten her eye and quicken her step.

As the great bare horse-chestnut near the pink-house gate loomed into
view, the red linsey-woolsey speck going down the road spied the
blue linsey-woolsey speck coming up, and both specks flew over the
intervening distance and, meeting, embraced each other ardently,
somewhat to the injury of the company-tart.

"Didn't it come out splendidly?" exclaimed Rebecca. "I was so afraid
the fishman wouldn't tell you to start exactly at two, or that one of us
would walk faster than the other; but we met at the very spot! It was a
very uncommon idea, wasn't it? Almost romantic!"

"And what do you think?" asked Clara Belle proudly. "Look at this! Mrs.
Fogg lent me her watch to come home by!"

"Oh, Clara Belle, how wonderful! Mrs. Fogg gets kinder and kinder to
you, doesn't she? You're not homesick any more, are you?"

"No-o; not really; only when I remember there's only little Susan to
manage the twins; though they're