“It is quite dark already,” she said, “and it is not fit for that child to go alone with nobody but that boy, after the fright she has had this afternoon.  She is just in the condition now when a shadow might upset her.  You really must go with her, Randolph.”

“I have no intention of doing anything else, mother,” Randolph replied, laughing.  He had been, indeed, taking his overcoat from the tree in the hall when his mother had come out to speak to him.  Charlotte had said, on rising from the table, that she must go home at once.

Mrs. Anderson enveloped the girl in her large, gentle, lavender-scented embrace, and received with pleasant disclaimers her assurances of obligations and thanks; then she stood in the window and, with a little misgiving, and a ready imagination for future trouble, watched them emerge from the little front yard and disappear down the street under the low-growing maple branches which were turning slowly, and flashed gold over their heads in electric lights.  She reflected judicially that while Charlotte was undoubtedly a sweet girl, and very pretty, very pretty, indeed, and, while her own heart was drawn to her, yet she would make no sort of wife for her son.  She remembered with a shudder Eddy’s remarks at the table.

“He is a pretty little boy, too,” she thought, with a maternal thrill, remembering her own son at that age.  When she returned to the dining-room to wash the pink-and-gold cups and saucers, in her little bowl of hot water on the end of the table, as was her custom when the best china had been used, the maid, who was clearing the table, and who had been encouraged to conversation from the lack of another woman in the house, and her mistress’s habit of gentle garrulity, spoke upon the subject in her mind.

“Them was them Carrolls that lives in the Ranger place, was they not?” said she.  The maid was a curious product of the region, having somewhat anomalously graduated at a high-school in New Sanderson before entering service, and gotten a strange load of unassimilated knowledge, which was particularly exemplified in her English.  She scorned contractions, but equally scorned possessives and legitimate tenses.  She wrote a beautiful hand, using quite ambitious words, but she totally misinterpreted the meaning of these very words in current literature, particularly the cook-book.  Her bread was as heavy with undigested facts as is the stomach of a dyspeptic with food, but she was, in a way, a good servant, very faithful, attached to Mrs. Anderson, and a guileless purveyor of gossip, which rendered her exceedingly entertaining.  She sniffed meaningly now in response to Mrs. Anderson’s affirmative with regard to the identity of the recent guests.

“They did not fail to eat enough,” said she, presently, packing up the plates and looking at her mistress, who was drying carefully a pink-and-gold cup on a soft towel.

“Yes, they seemed to relish the food,” responded Mrs. Anderson.