Suddenly, in the lane by the house, she heard a voice talking to Joel,—­the huckster-girl.  What a weak, cheery sound it was in the cold and fog!  It touched her curiously:  broke through her morbid thought as anything true and healthy would have done.  “Poor Lois!” she thought, with an eager pity, forgetting her own intolerable future for the moment, as she gathered up some breakfast and went with it down the lane.  Morning had come; great heavy bars of light fell from behind the hills athwart the banks of gray and black fog; there was shifting, uneasy, obstinate tumult among the shadows; they did not mean to yield to the coming dawn.  The hills, the massed woods, the mist opposed their immovable front, scornfully.  Margaret did not notice the silent contest until she reached the lane.  The girl Lois, sitting in her cart, was looking, quiet, attentive, at the slow surge of the shadows, and the slower lifting of the slanted rays.

“T’ mornin’ comes grand here, Miss Marg’et!” she said, lowering her voice.

Margaret said nothing in reply; the morning, she thought, was gray and cold, as her own life.  She stood leaning on the low cart; some strange sympathy drew her to this poor wretch, dwarfed, alone in the world,—­some tie of equality, which the odd childish face, nor the quaint air of content about the creature, did not lessen.  Even when Lois shook down the patched skirt of her flannel frock straight, and settled the heaps of corn and tomatoes about her, preparatory for a start, Margaret kept her hand on the side of the cart, and walked slowly by it down the road.  Once, looking at the girl, she thought with a half smile how oddly clean she was.  The flannel skirt she arranged so complacently had been washed until the colors had run madly into each other in sheer desperation; her hair was knotted with a relentless tightness into a comb such as old women wear.  The very cart, patched as it was, had a snug, cozy look; the masses of vegetables, green and crimson and scarlet, were heaped with a certain reference to the glow of color, Margaret noticed, wondering if it were accidental.  Looking up, she saw the girl’s brown eyes fixed on her face.  They were singularly soft, brooding brown.

“Ye’r’ goin’ to th’ mill, Miss Marg’et?” she asked, in a half whisper.

“Yes.  You never go there now, Lois?”

“No, ’m.”

The girl shuddered, and then tried to hide it in a laugh.  Margaret walked on beside her, her hand on the cart’s edge.  Somehow this creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside as a failure, so marred, imperfect, that even the dogs were kind to her, came strangely near to her, claimed recognition by some subtile instinct.