Hazel sank wearily into her chair and sipped the milk unhungrily. She wished she had not come; wished the day were over, and that she might have planned something more interesting; wished she had chosen different people to be of her party; and idly watched a white hen with yellow kid boots and a coral comb in her nicely groomed hair picking daintily about the green under the oak trees that shaded the street. She listened to the drone of the bees in the garden near by, the distant whetting of a scythe, the monotonous whang of a steam thresher not far away, the happy voices of children, and thought how empty a life in this village would be; almost as dreary and uninteresting as living in a desert--and then suddenly she caught a name and the pink flew into her cheeks and memory set her heart athrob.
It was the landlord talking to a lingering summer boarder, a quiet, gray-haired woman who sat reading at the end of the piazza.
"Well, Miss Norton, so you're goin' to leave us next week. Sorry to hear it. Don't seem nat'ral 'thout you clear through October. Ca'c'late you're comin' back to Granville in the spring?"
Granville! Granville! Where had she heard of Granville? Ah! She knew instantly. It was his old home! His mother lived there! But then of course it might have been another Granville. She wasn't even sure what state they were in now, New Hampshire or Vermont. They had been wavering about on the state line several times that day, and she never paid attention to geography.
Then the landlord raised his voice again.
He was gazing across the road where a white colonial house, white-fenced with pickets like clean sugar frosting, nestled in the luscious grass, green and clean and fresh, and seeming utterly apart from the soil and dust of the road, as if nothing wearisome could ever enter there. Brightly there bloomed a border of late flowers, double asters, zinnias, peonies, with a flame of scarlet poppies breaking into the smoke-like blue of larkspurs and bachelor buttons, as it neared the house. Hazel had not noticed it until now and she almost cried out with pleasure over the splendour of colour.
"Wal," said the landlord chinking some loose coins in his capacious pockets, "I reckon Mis' Brownleigh'll miss yeh 'bout as much as enny of us. She lots on your comin' over to read to her. I've heerd her say as how Amelia Ellen is a good nurse, but she never was much on the readin', an' Amelia Ellen knows it too. Mis' Brownleigh she'll be powerful lonesome fer yeh when yeh go. It's not so lively fur her tied to her bed er her chair, even ef John does write to her reg'lur twicet a week."