Nance laboriously drew a back breadth of her coarse plaid skirt round to the front, and displayed it, without a word. A three-cornered tear of the kind known as a barn-door had been treated by tying a white string well outside it, and gathering up the cloth, like a bag. Dorcas's sense of fitness forbade her to see anything humorous in so original a device. She stood before the woman in all the moral excellence of a censor fastidiously clad. "O Nancy Pete!" she exclaimed. "How could you?" Nance put her cold pipe in her mouth, and began sucking at the unresponsive stem. "You 'ain't got a bite of anything t' eat, have ye?" she asked, indifferently. Dorcas went to the pantry, and brought forth pie, doughnuts and cheese, and a dish of cold beans. The coffee-pot was waiting on the stove. One would have said the visitor had been expected. Nance rose and tramped over to the table. But Dorcas stood firmly in the way. "No, Nancy, no! You wait a minute! Are you going to meeting to-day?" "I 'ain't had a meal o' victuals for a week!" remarked Nance, addressing no one in particular. "Nancy, are you going to meeting?" "Whose seat be I goin' to set in?" inquired Nance, rebelliously, yet with a certain air of capitulation. "You can sit in mine. Haven't you sat there for the last five years? Now, Nancy, don't hinder me!" "Plague take it, then! I'll go!" At this expected climax, Dorcas stood aside, and allowed her visitor to serve herself with beans. When Nance's first hunger had been satisfied, she began a rambling monologue, of an accustomed sort to which Dorcas never listened. "I went down to peek into the Poorhouse winders, this mornin'. There they all sut, like rats in a trap. 'Got ye, 'ain't they?' says I. Old Sal Flint she looked up, an' if there'd been a butcher-knife handy, I guess she'd ha' throwed it. 'It's that Injun!' says she to Mis' Giles. 'Don't you take no notice!' 'I dunno's I'm an Injun,' says I, 'I dunno how much Injun I be. I can't look so fur back as that. I dunno's there's any more Injun in me than there is devil in you!' I says. An' then the overseer he come out, an' driv' me off. 'You won't git me in there,' says I to him, 'not so long's I've got my teeth to chaw sassafras, an' my claws to dig me a holler in the ground!' But when I come along, he passed me on the road, an' old Sal Flint sut up by him on the seat, like a bump on a log. I guess he was carryin' her over to that Pope-o'-Rome meetin' they've got over to Sudleigh." Dorcas turned about, in anxious interest. "Oh, I wonder if he was! How _can_ folks give up their own meeting for that?" Nance pushed her chair back from the table. "Want to see all kinds, I s'pose," she said, slyly. "Guess I'll try it myself, another Sunday!" "Anybody to home?" came a very high and wheezy voice from the doorway. Dorcas knew that also, and so did Nance Pete.