The Widowed Bride — page 39: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

30 THE WIDOWED BRIDE. sit down and rest! I can’t walk another step; my feet ache so hard, and my head feels giddy!” “Only a little ways farther, Allie,’ ’ persuaded her sister. “7 think we shall come to some houses soon.’ ‘‘] can’t, Rena.” And something in the piteous tone of her voice told Rena that the poor child was utterly exhausted. She sat down in the grass, under the protecting shadow of an overhanging hedgerow, where the level rays of the early morning sun turned the dewy jeweling of the short grass to diamonds, and took Alice’s head in her lap, with a protecting tenderness which was infinitely pathetic in one so young. But Alice sat up again, clutching her sister’s arm, with a face of terror. ‘What is it, Allie?’ questioned Rena. — “Some one’s watching us from the other side of the hedge,” whispered Alice. ‘‘I saw eyes looking at me through the bushes, and a woman’s face.” Rena sprang to her feet, with an unshaped idea that the “White Woman” had followed them even thither; but the next moment a brown hand put aside the thick foliage, and a tall, lithe figure crept through the boughs and stood con- fronting them. It was the figure of a woman considerably past middle life, yet erect and well-molded, with a bronzed face, small, black eyes, which roved hither 400 thither with a keen, restless light, and long, black ‘hair, strewn with white, which hung down her back, over a weather-stained ‘cloak of coarse red camlet. A calico handkerchief was tied over the top of her head, she wore the coarsest ef shoes on her feet, and her dress was of rusty black, scarcely reaching to her ankles. A spot inthe grass, crushed and tumbled, showed where she had been lying, and a small, compactly tied bundle had evi- _dently.served for a piliow. Rena had not unfrequently seen such women before, and knew her at once fora wayside tramp—a pr etended gipsy, who earned a precarious liveli- hood by telling fortunes, or begging from door to door of the hospitable ‘farmers’ houses, ‘And who be vou,” she demanded, shrilly, ‘‘as comes racketin’ along, frightenin’ a honest woman out of a year’s growth, just as she’s had her down for a wink O ’ sleep? Who | be you, and what lay are you on?” --comicbooks.co