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As they hurried home, Miss Grant had a good look at the stranger a pleasant, brown-skinned brown-handed youth, with the down of a black moustache growing on his upper lip. His frank and open face was easy to read.
The loafers stared boldly at Virginia Aydelot as she rode up before the livery stable and slipped from her saddle. Not because a woman in a calico dress and sunbonnet, a tanned, brown-handed woman, was a novelty there, but because the license of the place was one of impudence and disrespect. The saloon was on one side of the livery stable and the postoffice was on the other side.
As Jane Aydelot studied the burning coals in the grate, he studied her face, and what he read there gave him both pleasure and pain. Between him and that face came the image of Virginia Aydelot, who should be there instead; of the brown-handed farmer's wife, who had given up so much for the West.
Some quick remembrance of the brown-handed claimholders' wives crossed his mind at that instant, and like a cruel stab to his memory came unbidden the picture of Virginia Thaine in her dainty girlishness in the old mansion house of the years now dead.
The two other relations were, first, a brown-faced and brown-handed farmer, Alonzo Granger, and an old lady, of seventy or thereabouts Miss Nancy Carter, a sister of the deceased. For years she had lived on a small pension from her brother, increased somewhat by knitting stockings for the neighbors. She, indeed, was the only real mourner.
I am sure it was convincing to a brown-handed farmer who sat beside us, and who could with difficulty restrain his applauding comment. But I was lost in a dream of a near heaven, and could not follow the spoken word.
Then once more Redesman and his mates took up the song: Come tell me, O friends, for whom bideth the maiden Wet-foot from the river-ford down in the Dale? For whom hath the goodwife the ox-waggon laden With the babble of children, brown-handed and hale? Come tell me for what are the women abiding, Till each on the other aweary they lean?
Gone to the great city, the place "too big to live in." Gone there for knowledge, training, cultivation, larger life, and finer uses! Gone to study an art, an art! Risen beyond him "like a diamond in the sky." And he fool enough to come rambling back, blue-shirted and brown-handed, expecting to find her still a tavern maid! So, farewell fantasy! 'Twas better so; much better.
I am sure it was convincing to a brown-handed farmer who sat beside us, and who could with difficulty restrain his applauding comment. But I was lost in a dream of a near heaven, and could not follow the spoken word.
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