CHAPTER IX.

That evening Mrs. Rexford and Sophia had been sitting sewing, as they often did, under a tree near the house.  Sophia had mused and stitched.  Then there came a time when her hands fell idle, and she looked off at the scene before her.  It was the hour when the sun has set, and the light is not less than daylight but mellower.  She observed with pleasure how high the hops had grown that she had planted against the gables of the house and dairies.  On this side the house there was no yard, only the big hay-fields from which the hay had been taken a month before; in them were trees here and there, and beyond she saw the running river.  She had seen it all every day that summer, yet—­

“I think I never saw the place look so nice,” she said to her step-mother.

Dottie came walking unsteadily over the thick grass.  She had found an ox-daisy and a four-o’clock.

“Here! take my pretties,” she said imperiously.

Sophia took them.

“They’s to be blowed,” said Dottie, not yet distinguishing duly the different uses of flowers or of words.

Sophia obediently blew, and the down of the four-o’clock was scattered into space; but the daisy, impervious to the blast, remained in the slender hand that held it.  Dottie looked at it with indignation.

“Blow again!” was her mandate, and Sophia, to please her, plucked the white petals one by one, so that they might be scattered.  It was not wonderful that, as she did so, the foolish old charm of her school-days should say itself over in her mind, and the lot fell upon “He loves me.”  “Who, I wonder?” thought Sophia, lightly fanciful; and she did not care to think of the wealthy suitor she had cast aside.  Her mind glanced to Robert Trenholme.  “No,” she thought, “he loves me not.”  She meditated on him a little.  Such thoughts, however transient, in a woman of twenty-eight, are different from the same thoughts when they come to her at eighteen.  If she be good, they are deeper, as the river is deeper than the rivulet; better, as the poem of the poet is better than the songs of his youth.  Then for some reason—­the mischief of idleness, perhaps—­Sophia thought of Trenholme’s young brother—­how he had looked when he spoke to her over the fence.  She rose to move away from such silly thoughts.

Dottie possessed herself of two fingers and pulled hard toward the river.  Dearly did she love the river-side, and mamma, who was very cruel, would not allow her to go there without a grown-up companion.