Jed looked at her, stepped to the door, opened it and looked out, and then turned back again.

“Why,” he admitted, “it is gettin’ a little shadowy in the corners, maybe.  It will be darker in an hour or so.  But you think it’s too dark for little girls already, eh?”

She nodded.  “I don’t think Mamma would like me to be out when it’s so awful dark,” she said.

“Hum! . . .  Hum. . . .  Does your mamma know where you are?”

The young lady’s toe marked a circle on the shop floor.

“No-o,” she confessed, “I—­I guess she doesn’t, not just exactly.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised.  And so you’ve come back because you was afraid, eh?”

She swallowed hard and edged a little nearer to him.

“No-o,” she declared, stoutly, “I—­I wasn’t afraid, not very; but—­ but I thought the—­the swordfish was pretty heavy to carry all alone and—­and so—­”

Jed laughed aloud, something that he rarely did.

“Good for you, sis!” he exclaimed.  “Now you just wait until I get my hat and we’ll carry that heavy fish home together.”

Miss Armstrong looked decidedly happier.

“Thank you very much,” she said.  “And—­and, if you please, my name is Barbara.”

CHAPTER IV

The Smalley residence, where Mrs. Luretta Smalley, relict of the late Zenas T., accommodated a few “paying guests,” was nearly a mile from the windmill shop and on the Orham “lower road.”  Mr. Winslow and his new acquaintance took the short cuts, through by-paths and across fields, and the young lady appeared to have thoroughly recovered from her misgivings concerning the dark—­in reality it was scarcely dusk—­and her doubts concerning her ability to carry the “heavy” swordfish without help.  At all events she insisted upon carrying it alone, telling her companion that she thought perhaps he had better not touch it as it was so very, very brittle and might get broken, and consoling him by offering to permit him to carry Petunia, which fragrant appellation, it appeared, was the name of the doll.

“I named her Petunia after a flower,” she explained.  “I think she looks like a flower, don’t you?”

If she did it was a wilted one.  However, Miss Armstrong did not wait for comment on the part of her escort, but chatted straight on.  Jed learned that her mother’s name was Mrs. Ruth Phillips Armstrong.  “It used to be Mrs. Seymour Armstrong, but it isn’t now, because Papa’s name was Doctor Seymour Armstrong and he died, you know.”  And they lived in a central Connecticut city, but perhaps they weren’t going to live there any more because Mamma had sold the house and didn’t know exactly what to do.  And they had been in Orham ever since before the Fourth of July, and they liked it ever so much, it was so quaint and—­and “franteek”—­

Jed interrupted here.  “So quaint and what?” he demanded.