The next morning was cold and frosty, as winter mornings in New England
are wont to be, and Adah, accustomed to the more genial climate of
Kentucky, shivered involuntarily as from her uncurtained window she
looked out upon the bare woods and the frozen fields covered with the
snow of yesterday.
Across the track, near to a dilapidated board fence, a family carriage
was standing, the driver unnecessarily, as it seemed to Adah--holding
the heads of the horses, who neither sheered nor jumped, nor gave other
tokens that they feared the hissing engine. She had not seen that
carriage when it drove up before the door, nor yet the young man who had
alighted from it; but as she stood there, a loud laugh reached her ear,
making her start suddenly, it was so like his--like George's.
"It could not be George," she said; that were impossible, and yet she
crept softly out into the hall, and leaning over the banister, listened
eagerly to the sounds from the room below, where a crowd of men were
assembled.
The laugh was not repeated, and with a dim feeling of disappointment she
went back to the window where on Willie's neck she wept the tears which
always flowed when she thought of George's desertion. There was a knock
at the door, and the baggageman appeared.
"If you please, ma'am," he began, "the Terrace Hill carriage is here. I
told the driver how't you wanted to go there. Shall I give him your
trunk?"
Adah answered in the affirmative, and then hastened to wrap up Willie,
glancing again at the carriage, which, now that it was associated with
the gentle Anna, looked far better to her than it had at first. She was
ready in a moment and descended to the room where Jim, the driver, stood
waiting for her.
"A lady," was his mental comment, and with as much politeness as if she
had been Madam Richards herself, he opened the carriage door and held
Willie while she entered, asking if she were comfortable, and peering a
little curiously in Willie's face, which puzzled him somewhat. "A near
connection, I guess, and mighty pretty too. Them old maids will raise
hob with the boy,--nice little shaver," thought the kind-hearted Jim.
Once, as Adah caught his good-humored eye, she ventured to say to him: "Has Miss Anna procured a waiting maid yet?"
There was a comical gleam in Jim's eye now, for Adah was not the first
applicant he had taken up to Terrace Hill. He never suspected that this
was Adah's business, and he answered frankly: "No, that's about played out. Madam turned the last one out doors."
"Turned her out doors?" and Adah's face was as white as the snow rifts
they were passing.
The driver felt that he had gossiped too much, and relapsed into
silence, while Adah, in a paroxysm of terror, sat with clasped hands and
closed eyes. Leaning forward, at last she said, huskily: "Driver, driver, do you think she'll turn me off, too?"