“Yes’m.  Oh, yes, indeed!”

“And your mother, is she real rugged?  She need to be, with such a flock of little ones!”

“Yes, motha’s always well.  Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and ought to keep more in the open aia.  That’s what he’s done since he came he’e.  He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out himself.”

“Is he a ca’penta?” asked Mrs. Lander.

“No’m; but he’s—­I don’t know how to express it—­he likes to do every kind of thing.”

“But he’s got some business, ha’n’t he?” A shadow of severity crept over Mrs. Lander’s tone, in provisional reprehension of possible shiftlessness.

“Yes’m.  He was a machinist at the Mills; that’s what the doctas thought didn’t agree with him.  He bought a piece of land he’e, so as to be in the pine woods, and then we built this house.”

“When did you say you came?”

“Two yea’s ago, this summa.”

“Well!  What did you do befoa you built this house?”

“We camped the first summa.”

“You camped?  In a tent?”

“Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank.”

“I should have thought you would have died.”

The girl laughed.  “Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate.  We slept in the tents we had two—­and we cooked in the shanty.”  She smiled at the notion in adding, “At fast the neighbas thought we we’e Gipsies; and the summa folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us.”

Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, “But didn’t it almost perish you, stayin’ through the winter in an unfinished house?”

“Well, it was pretty cold.  But it was so dry, the aia was, and the woods kept the wind off nicely.”

The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the girl to the Landers now called her from them.  “Clem!  Come here a minute!”

The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, “You’ll have to excuse me, now’m.  I’ve got to go to motha.”

“So do!” said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl’s art and grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was not aware of her husband’s starting up the horse in time to stop him.  They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, “What you doin’, Albe’t?  Whe’e you goin’?”

“I’m goin’ to South Middlemount.  Didn’t you want to?”

“Well, of all the men!  Drivin’ right off without waitin’ to say thankye to the child, or take leave, or anything!”

“Seemed to me as if she took leave.”

“But she was comin’ back!  And I wanted to ask—­”

“I guess you asked enough for one while.  Ask the rest to-morra.”

Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already, perhaps, intimated itself to her.  She said, “That’s true,” but by the time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity.  “Well, all I’ve got to say is that I sha’n’t rest till I know all about ’em.”