As for the girl, she looked timid, yet determined.  She was pretty, perhaps a beauty, had she made the most of her personal advantages instead of apparently ignoring them.  Her beautiful fair hair, which had red-gold lights, should have shaded her forehead, which was too high.  Instead it was drawn smoothly back, and fastened in a mat of compact flat braids at the back of her head.  She was dressed very simply, in black, and her costume was not of the latest mode.

“I don’t see anything about her to have made Mrs. Fulsom think she was rich,” Mrs. Whittle whispered to Mrs. Daggett, who made an unexpectedly shrewd retort:  “I can see.  She don’t look as if she cared what anybody thought of her clothes; as if she had so much she’s never minded.”

Mrs. Whittle failed to understand.  She grunted non-assent.  “I don’t see,” said she.  “Her sleeves are way out of date.”

For awhile there was a loud buzz of conversation all over the room.  Then it ceased, for things were happening, amazing things.  The strange young lady was buying and she was paying cash down.  Some of the women examined the bank notes suspiciously and handed them to their husbands to verify.  The girl saw, and flushed, but she continued.  She went from table to table, and she bought everything, from quilts and hideous drawn-in rugs to frosted cakes.  She bought in the midst of that ominous hush of suspicion.  Once she even heard a woman hiss to another, “She’s crazy.  She got out of an insane asylum.”

However nobody of all the stunned throng refused to sell.  Her first failure came in the case of a young man.  He was Jim Dodge, Fanny’s brother.  Jim Dodge was a sort of Ishmael in the village estimation, and yet he was liked.  He was a handsome young fellow with a wild freedom of carriage.  He had worked in the chair factory to support his mother and sister, before it closed.  He haunted the woods, and made a little by selling skins.  He had brought as his contribution to the fair a beautiful fox skin, and when the young woman essayed to buy that he strode forward.  “That is not for sale,” said he.  “I beg you to accept that as a gift, Miss Orr.”

The young fellow blushed a little before the girl’s blue eyes, although he held himself proudly.  “I won’t have this sold to a young lady who is buying as much as you are,” he continued.

The girl hesitated.  Then she took the skin.  “Thank you, it is beautiful,” she said.

Jim’s mother sidled close to him.  “You did just right, Jim,” she whispered.  “I don’t know who she is, but I feel ashamed of my life.  She can’t really want all that truck.  She’s buying to help.  I feel as if we were a parcel of beggars.”

“Well, she won’t buy that fox skin to help!” Jim whispered back fiercely.

The whole did not take very long.  Finally the girl talked in a low voice to Mrs. Black who then became her spokeswoman.  Mrs. Black now looked confident, even triumphant.  “Miss Orr says of course she can’t possibly use all the cake and pies and jelly,” she said, “and she wants you to take away all you care for.  And she wants to know if Mrs. Whittle will let the other things stay here till she’s got a place to put them in.  I tell her there’s no room in my house.”