If you ask me how my aunt, a decent, law-abiding woman--a sick woman at that--took a firebrand like Deolda into her home, all I would be able to answer is: If you had seen her stand there, as I did, on the porch that morning, you wouldn't ask the question. The doorbell rang and my aunt opened it, I tagging behind. There was a girl there who looked as though she were daring all mankind, a strange girl with skin tawny, like sand on a hot day, and dark, brooding eyes. My aunt said: "You want to see me?" The girl glanced up slowly under her dark brows that looked as if they had been drawn with a pencil. "I've come to work for you," she said in a shy, friendly fashion. "I'm a real strong girl." No one could have turned her away, not unless he were deaf and blind, not unless he were ready to murder happiness. I was fifteen and romantic, and I was bedazzled just as the others were. She made me think of dancing women I have heard of, and music, and of soft, starlit nights, velvet black. She was more foreign than anything I had ever seen and she meant to me what she did to plenty of others--romance. She must have meant it to my aunt, sick as she was and needing a hired girl. So when Deolda asked, in that soft way of hers: "Shall I stay?" "Yes," answered my aunt, reluctantly, her eyes on the girl's lovely mouth. While she stood there, her shoulders drooping, her eyes searching my aunt's face, she still found time to shoot a glance like a flaming signal to Johnny Deutra, staring at her agape. I surprised the glance, and so did my aunt Josephine, who must have known she was in for nothing but trouble. And so was Johnny Deutra, for from that first glance of Deolda's that dared him, love laid its heavy hand on his young shoulders. "What's your name, dear?" my aunt asked. "Deolda Costa," said she. "Oh, you're one-armed Manel's girl. I don't remember seeing you about lately." "I been working to New Bedford. My father an' mother both died. I came up for the funeral. I--don't want to go back to the mills--" Then sudden fury flamed in her. "I hate the men there!" she cried. "I'd drown before I'd go back!" "There, there, dear," my aunt soothed her. "You ain't going back--you're going to work for Auntie Kingsbury." That was the way Deolda had. She never gave one any chance for an illusion about her, for there was handsome Johnny Deutra still hanging round the gate watching Deolda, and she already held my aunt's heart in her slender hand. My aunt went around muttering, "One-armed Manel's girl!" She appealed to me: "She's got to live somewhere, hasn't she?" I imagine that my aunt excused herself for deliberately, running into foul weather by telling herself that Deolda Was her "lot," something the Lord had sent her to take care of. "Who was one-armed Manel?" I asked, tagging after my aunt.