The door was wide open, and she walked in before me.  “Guess who has come to see us!” she cried.

Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair creaked.  I judged he was disturbed in his nap.

“Mother!” she called in her clear young voice.  “Puss!”

Puss was her sister.

She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.

“You’d better sit down, Willie,” said her father; “now you have got here.  How’s your mother?”

He looked at me curiously as he spoke.

He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers.  He was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the bright effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his cheek to flow down into his beard.  He was short but strongly built, and his beard and mustache were the biggest things about him.  She had taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear skin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain quickness she got from her mother.  Her mother I remember as a sharp-eyed woman of great activity; she seems to me now to have been perpetually bringing in or taking out meals or doing some such service, and to me—­for my mother’s sake and my own—­she was always welcoming and kind.  Puss was a youngster of fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like her mother’s, are the chief traces on my memory.  All these people were very kind to me, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes very agreeably finding expression, that I was—­“clever.”  They all stood about me as if they were a little at a loss.

“Sit down!” said her father.  “Give him a chair, Puss.”

We talked a little stiffly—­they were evidently surprised by my sudden apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain to keep the conversation going.

“There!” she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed.  “I declare!” and she darted out of the room.

“Lord! what a girl it is!” said Mrs. Stuart.  “I don’t know what’s come to her.”

It was half an hour before Nettie came back.  It seemed a long time to me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again she was out of breath.  In the meantime, I had thrown out casually that I had given up my place at Rawdon’s.  “I can do better than that,” I said.

“I left my book in the dell,” she said, panting.  “Is tea ready?” and that was her apology. . .