Country Neighbors

"Walk right in," called Ann; but as nobody responded, she got up and opened the door herself. A young man stood on the broad stone, shabby, dust-covered, and with a tired face....

A significant note had come into his voice. It indicated a complexity of understanding: chiefly that she would by nature resist what he had to say, and then resume her customary...

It seemed to Lydia Gale that from the moment she met Eben Jakes she understood what fun it was to laugh. She and her mother and three sisters lived together in a comfortable way...

Myron held her hand now with an involuntary fervor of his own, not so much because she bade him, but with the purpose of restraining her. An hour passed, and her blue eyes were...

"I don't know. To build a summer cottage, I suppose. That's what Richmond asked me, and I said I didn't know. Then he said he wasn't going to sell till he knew what he was selli...

He was removed and silent after this, and had scarcely a word for Marietta's late-blooming calla that had held her in suspense through the winter when she had wanted it, to unro...

Jim had no garden. Years ago, when his wife had left him, to run away with another man, he had tried to wipe out every sign of his life with her. It was in the early spring of t...

"She's a great talker, seems if I remembered," said Jerry absently, wishing Stella would keep her hands under the shawl and not get them frozen to death. He was about to add tha...

"If you don't like that kind o' readin', Jake, we'll try suthin' else," he conceded generously. "I jest as soon play fox an' geese Sunday nights if anybody wants to. I ain't one...

Dorcas, an hour after, at her table ironing the dotted muslin she had washed and dried before the fire, laughed out again. She had a new sense of triumph, like a bloom upon the...

Amelia Maxwell sat by the front-chamber window of the great house overlooking the road, and her own "story-an'-a-half" farther toward the west. Every day she was alone under her...

"Well," she said, "when I travel back over the seams I've sewed, looks like a good long day. I guess there's miles enough of 'em to stretch from here to State o' Maine."

When his carriage had left the gate, and Clelia came in with that last look of her lover still mirrored in her eyes, Sabrina lay there floating in her sea of happiness.

At ten o'clock her work was done, and she established herself by the sitting-room window, her knitting in hand, to watch for him who was to come. A warm excitement flooded throu...

The next day Miss Letty set about cleaning her house, the actual first step toward leaving it; and suddenly, as she worked, at a moment she could never identify, it came over he...

The electrifying meaning ran over them like a wave. They caught the splendid significance of it. They were to offer, in the guise of jesting, their big protest against the folly...

For a long time, it seemed to her, she sat there, trying to still her breath and school herself into her old serenity. Then, with her handkerchief, a little wet ball, tight in o...

"Pretty good-lookin' old lady, I think myself," said Eben, with a proud carelessness. "Course she's nothin' to what my first wife was at her age; but then, nobody'd expect that...

The roll of plans stuck out from his coat pocket. That was all Amarita could see. She laid hands upon him and drew him into the entry. There she shut the door and then stood wit...