Mrs. Anderson reflected that a man might easily admire either of these women.  Her manner, in spite of herself, cooled towards them.  She did not think of the third woman, who was married, except to ply her with cake and tea and inquire for her husband and children.  The woman, after she had finished her cake and tea, sat sunken in her corsets, under her loosely fitting black silk, and looked stupidly amiable.  She rose with a slight sigh of relief when at last the others made a motion to go.  She thought of her supper at home, and the children long out of school.  It was past supper-time for Banbridge.  The sun was quite low.  An hour ago a little herd of cows had pelted by in a cloud of dust, with great udders swinging perilously, going home to be milked.

“That Flannigan boy always runs those cows home,” said the aunt, disapprovingly, as she passed the window.

“I have always heard it was bad for the milk,” assented Mrs. Anderson.

Now that her callers were on the move, Mrs. Anderson was exceedingly cordial.  She said something further about the quality of the cream obtained from the cows, and the aunt said yes, it was very good, although so dear.  The old lady kissed both the aunt and the niece when they at last went out of the door, and said she was so glad that she was at home, and begged them to come again.  She stood in the door watching them get into the coach.  The young girl’s face in the window, with her beflowered hat, a rose crowned with roses, in the dark setting of the window, was beautiful.  Even the aunt’s face, older and more colorless, except for an unlovely flush of excitement, was pathetically compelling and charmed.  Mrs. Anderson, filling up the doorway with her stately bulk, swept around by her soft black draperies, her fair old face rising from a foam of lace, and delicately capped with lace, on which was a knot of palest lavender, stood in a frame of luxuriant Virginia-creeper, and smiled and nodded graciously to her departing guests, while wondering if they would meet her son coming home.  After that followed a reflection as to the undesirability of either of them as a possible daughter-in-law.

Just as she was turning to enter the house, after the coach had rolled out of sight, she saw her son coming down the street under the green shade of the maples which bordered it.  The mother went toddling on her tiny feet down the steps to the gate to meet her son.  The house stood quite close to the road; indeed, only a little bricked-path separated it from the sidewalk.  All the ground was at the sides and back.  The house was a square old affair with a row of half-windows in the third-story, or attic, and considerable good old panel-work and ornamentation about it.  On the right side of the house was a large old flower-garden, now just beginning to assert itself anew; on the left were the stable and some out-buildings, with a grassy oval of lawn in the centre of a sweep of drive; in the rear was a kitchen-garden and a field rising to the railroad, for railroads circled all Banbridge in their vises of iron arms.  A station was only a short distance farther up this same street.  As Mrs. Anderson stood waiting and her son was advancing down the street a train from the city rumbled past.  When Randolph had come up, and they had both entered the house, a carriage passed swiftly and both saw it from the parlor window.