Nobody's Child

ore had said, it was best to put the sorrel out of pain at once. She did not feel, as the young man Garvin had called Baird had felt, that it was an outrageous thing for G

ife to Westmore. But, now that she and his father were gone, he had returned to Westmore with the fortune she had left him and was head of the family. And yet he remembered them all, her grandfather and her Aunt Sue and her father, who had been away from the Ridge as long as Ann could remember, and her mother, whom

ine Banks for fascinating visits to its caves and ore-pits, the tall boy who galloped recklessly up hill and down, always with several hounds at his horse's heels, w

sed femininity had instantly responded. Ann had learned that day, for the first time, that she was pretty and that it was possible for her to arouse admiration. And during the last two weeks.... It was not merely pity for the sorrel that had set her cheeks aflame and made her eyes moist; it was excitement, the stir of commingled emoti

d of Edward Westmore's talk with her or of Garvin-not even to her Aunt Sue. Sue, in her quiet way, hated the Westmores as bitterly as her grandfather did. Ann's swift liking for these two men who had, each in his own fashion, been nice to her, and her swift determination to be nice in return, was a thing to be carefully concealed.

ing lids, lips full but smileless, cheeks and chin so rounded and infantile that they were appealing. Life might make hers a voluptuous face, there was more than a hint of the probability in the desirous mouth an

he woodshed, towering high above a steep-pitched roof and the alanthus and locust trees that in summer shaded it. The woods through which Ann had just passed semicircled the upward sloping field that lay between her and the farm buildings. To the right, the slope was crested by an orchard, and to the left, stretching from the

r of chickens. Beyond the marsh, under a group of weeping-willows, was the spring and the usual accompaniment, a spring-house. Ann had expected to see her aunt's red shawl either at the spring or on the path that led up between the

Aunt Sue, the smoldering rebellion the farm had bred in Ann would have flared dangerously. As long as she had been too young to understand, and had had the fields and the woods, it had not mattered so much. In a vague way, Ann had always felt that she was nobody's child, a nonentity to her grandfather except when her high spirits, tinged always by coquetry, and her i

ather and aunt, lay between the upper and nether millstones. The clannish pride that lay in every Penniman lay in her also, and yet, Ann had felt, vaguely as a child and poignantly as she grew older, that she was of them and yet not of them. Her gr

nd went on to the house, past the basement door, to the stairs that led up to the kitchen, for the house, like the barn, was built on the slope, its fron

above were all that remained of the colonial house that antedated even Westmore. It was low-ceilinged, thick-walled, and casement-windowed, and had a fireplace spacious enough to seat a family. Built of English brick brought to the colony two centuries befo

house and the land "appertaining" from an encumbered Westmore, and had become father of the Pennimans now scattered through three counties. The

he crown of the slope and looked out over terraces whose antiquity scorned its brief thirty years; looked over and beyond them, to miles of rolling country. The narrow, back-breaking stairs that led from th

ere three steps. They led to the front bedrooms, her grandfather's addition to the old house. One room was his, the other had been Coats Penniman

ted an occasional visiting Penniman, had been closed for fourteen years. The

ed Ann's attention. Sue Penniman was always pale, Ann could easily remember the few times when she had seen color in her aunt's cheeks, and, though she always worked steadily, it was without energy or enthusiasm. But there was color in her cheeks now,

omin', Aunt Su

ugh for a quiver of feeling to cross her face. Then she came around t

," she said, her nasal drawl

widening her eyes and parting her lips, a lift of joy and of craving combined that

y-to-m

now?" Ann was q

n Brokaw broug

the hurt and isolation of Ann's seventeen

pain. It was a tribute to Ann's power of conce

lways so-gay. An' Coats has been away since you were a baby. I didn't think you'd care so much. I wanted to tell you, bu

have left me when I was a baby and never even have written to

I-don't-care way with you, and it worries your grandpa. He's seen a terrible lot of trouble. And since the stroke he had four year

imply stood, quivering

and it almost killed Coats. He loved your mother dearer than I've ever known any man love a woman. Every time he looked at you it brought it back to him. We went through a lot of trouble, Ann-dreadful trouble. It was too much for Coats to bear, an' he just went away from it, out west. But he wasn't forsakin' us-it wasn't like that. Why, all these years his thoughts have been here, and

brimming. "But I

ou remember that you're a Penniman and that the Pennimans always stand together and that there never was a better Penniman walked than Coats.... Just you do your duty and be patient, Ann, an

shoulders lifted. And hope, an ineradicable part of Ann, had also lifted. Sh

do. An' there's something I want you should do, an' that's to talk to Ben Brokaw. He says he's goin'. He's sitting down in the basement glum as a bear. When your grandpa tol' him Coats was comin' h

r she was thinking of something else. "Aun

stared at the girl. "Why are yo

h of defiance in her answer. "You and

asked. In all her knowledge of Sue, An

had been cherishing. She gave her version of what had happened that morning, and Sue listen

think his wife's money'll build up the family, but it won't. Coats will do more with his little twenty thousand than Edward with his big fortune." She lifted and brushed the fallen hair from her face, a gesture expressive of exasperation

they done to us

o was friend to a Penniman. But I don't want to think about them-least of all to-day.... Just you go on and talk to Ben-that'll be

hating like that, just because one's father hated before you?

child. And she was grown up now, and pretty. This recently discovered asset of hers meant a great deal to Ann. And if her father