But, although they were driving in the midst of a winter thaw, it was a pretty cold day, with an icy wind blowing down the back of her neck.  The early winter twilight was beginning to fall, and she felt rather empty.  She grew very tired of waiting, and remembered how the grocer’s boy at home had started his horse.  Then, summoning all her courage, with an apprehensive glance at Uncle Henry’s arithmetical silence, she slapped the reins up and down on the horses’ backs and made the best imitation she could of the grocer’s boy’s cluck.  The horses lifted their heads, they leaned forward, they put one foot before the other ... they were off!  The color rose hot on Elizabeth Ann’s happy face.  If she had started a big red automobile she would not have been prouder.  For it was the first thing she had ever done all herself ... every bit ... every smitch!  She had thought of it and she had done it.  And it had worked!

Now for what seemed to her a long, long time she drove, drove so hard she could think of nothing else.  She guided the horses around stones, she cheered them through freezing mud-puddles of melted snow, she kept them in the anxiously exact middle of the road.  She was quite astonished when Uncle Henry put his pencil and paper away, took the reins from her hands, and drove into a yard, on one side of which was a little low white house and on the other a big red barn.  He did not say a word, but she guessed that this was Putney Farm.

Two women in gingham dresses and white aprons came out of the house.  One was old and one might be called young, just like Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances.  But they looked very different from those aunts.  The dark-haired one was very tall and strong-looking, and the white-haired one was very rosy and fat.  They both looked up at the little, thin, white-faced girl on the high seat, and smiled.  “Well, Father, you got her, I see,” said the brown-haired one.  She stepped up to the wagon and held up her arms to the child.  “Come on, Betsy, and get some supper,” she said, as though Elizabeth Ann had lived there all her life and had just driven into town and back.

And that was the arrival of Elizabeth Ann at Putney Farm.

The brown-haired one took a long, strong step or two and swung her up on the porch.  “You take her in, Mother,” she said.  “I’ll help Father unhitch.”

The fat, rosy, white-haired one took Elizabeth Ann’s skinny, cold little hand in her soft warm fat one, and led her along to the open kitchen door.  “I’m your Aunt Abigail,” she said.  “Your mother’s aunt, you know.  And that’s your Cousin Ann that lifted you down, and it was your Uncle Henry that brought you out from town.”  She shut the door and went on, “I don’t know if your Aunt Harriet ever happened to tell you about us, and so ...”

Elizabeth Ann interrupted her hastily, the recollection of all Aunt Harriet’s remarks vividly before her.  “Oh yes, oh yes!” she said.  “She always talked about you.  She talked about you a lot, she ...”  The little girl stopped short and bit her lip.