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 passed 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 ravishing vision, in pink muslin; a smiling, contented vision of happy, rosy girlhood, coming back to the home-nest, where a thousand welcomes awaited her.

“Hello, 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.