Part 7 (1/2)

”I wish they'd work more and sing less,” said the Squire. ”All this singing business is too picturesque for me.”

”They've about finished, father. I came for the money to pay them off.”

It was characteristic of Dave to uphold the rights of the berry-pickers.

They were all friends of his, young men and women who sang in the village choir and who went out among their neighbors' berry patches in summer, and earned a little extra money in picking the fruit. The village thought only the more of them for their thrift, and their singing at the close of their work was generally regarded in the light of a favor.

Zeke, Sam, Cynthia and Amelia who formed the quartet, had all fine voices and no social function for miles around Wakefield was complete without their music.

The Squire said no more about the berry-pickers. Dave handed him a paper on which the time of each berry-picker and the amount of his or her wage was marked opposite. The Squire took it and adjusted his gla.s.ses with a certain grimness--he was honest to the core, but few things came harder to him than parting with money.

Dave and his mother at the churn exchanged a friendly wink. The extracting of coin from the head of the house was no easy process.

Mother and son both enjoyed its accomplishment through an outside agency.

It was too hard a process in the home circle to be at all agreeable.

While the Squire was wrestling with his arithmetic, Dave noticed a strange girl pa.s.s by the outer gate, pause, go on and then return. He looked at her with deep interest. She was so pale and tired-looking it seemed as if she had not strength enough left to walk to the house. Her long lashes rested wearily on the pale cheeks. She lifted them with an effort, and Dave found himself staring eagerly in a pair of great, sorrowful brown eyes.

The girl came on unsteadily up the walk to where the Squire sat, thumbing his account to the berry-pickers. ”Well, girl, who are you?” he said, not as unkindly as the words might imply.

The sound of her own voice, as she tried to answer his question, was like the far-off droning of a river. It did not seem to belong to her. ”My name is Moore--Anna Moore--and I thought--I hoped perhaps you might be good enough to give me work.” The strange faces spun about her eyes.

She tottered and would have fallen if Dave had not caught her.

Dave, the silent, the slow of action, the cool-headed, seemed suddenly bereft of his chilling serenity. ”Here, mother, a chair; father, some water, quick.” He carried the swooning girl to the shadow of the porch and fanned her tenderly with his broad-brimmed straw hat.

The old people hastened to do his bidding. Dave, excited and issuing orders in that tone, was too unusual to be pa.s.sed over lightly.

”What were you going to say, Miss Moore?” said the Squire as soon as the brown eyes opened.

”I thought, perhaps, I might find something to do here--I'm looking for work.”

”Why, my dear,” said Mrs. Bartlett, smoothing the dark curls, ”you are not fit to stand, let alone work.”

”You could not earn your salt,” was the Squire's less sympathetic way of expressing the same sentiment. ”Where is your home?”

”I have no home.” She looked at them desperately, her dark eyes appealing to one and the other, as if they were the jury that held her life in the balance. Only one pair of eyes seemed to hold out any hope.

”If you would only try me I could soon prove to you that I am not worthless.” Unconsciously she held out her hand in entreaty.

”Here we are, here we are, all off for Boston!” The voice was Hi's. He was just turning in at the field gate with Kate beside him. Kate, a ravis.h.i.+ng vision, in pink muslin; a smiling, contented vision of happy, rosy girlhood, coming back to the home-nest, where a thousand welcomes awaited her.

”h.e.l.lo, every one!” she said, running in and kissing them in turn, ”how nice it is to be home.”

They forgot the homeless stranger and her pleading for shelter in their glad welcome to the daughter of the house. She had shrunk back into the shadow. She had never felt the desolation, the utter loneliness of her position so keenly before.

”Hurrah for Kate!” cried the Squire, and everyone took it up and gave three cheers for Kate Brewster.

The wanderer withdrew into the deepest shadow of the porch, that her alien presence might not mar the joyous home-coming of Kate Brewster.

There was no jealousy in her soul for the fair girl who had such a royal welcome back to the home-nest. She would not have robbed her of it if such a thing had been possible, but the sense of her own desolation gripped at the heart like an iron band.

She waited like a mendicant to beg for the chance of earning her bread.