CHAPTER XXII NEW ARRIVALS The soft and balsam-scented air of summer fluttered the white curtains of Alice Cramer’s house as she sat before the open doorway awaiting, with no little anxiety, the arrival of her fashionable sister-in-law from San Francisco. And when her practised eye saw the carriage, a mere speck against the sky, coming across the prairie, her heart throbbed with the dread of meeting and she looked about her mean little apartments with a sense of embarrassment. What had come over her, that she should have lost the self-possession and ease of manner inherent in her, and become timid and awkward as the most illiterate of her neighbors? “I have been so long out of the world I am no longer myself,” she murmured, “and yet—and yet it is not wholly that. I seem to be living in a state of chronic fear. If only her coming will free me from those other visitors.” With a choking sensation in her throat, and trembling in her limbs, she arose as the carriage turned from the highway toward the house. She took in with a glance the blonde-haired, blue-eyed sister, the curled, elaborately-dressed child, and then her eyes rested upon the most beautiful face she had ever seen, it seemed to her. A face so commanding and bright, so impellingly attractive, she gazed at it in joyous wonder. Mark lifted them down from the carriage, one by one, and presented them to her, and the tears started in her eyes as Elinor kissed her fondly, called her sister Alice, and appeared to overlook the shabby apartments which had so distressed the housewife a few minutes before. The little boy bounded and capered in the joy of freedom as he looked at the boundless prairie, and Tibby Waring’s eyes glowed with tender moistness as she feasted upon the beauty of the expanse before her. “Oh, Mrs. Wylie, how lovely it is to breathe freely again,” she murmured as, after removing her wraps with the dust and stain of travel, she stood, later in the day, outside the cabin door and watched the red sun touch the prairie’s distant rim. “Yes, Tibby, you will be a child again with all these country wilds about you. You will have chickens, cows, and horses to your heart’s content. Mark, do you remember how we youngsters used to go out to grandpa’s?” “Indeed I do. I remember how you tried to walk a log across Willow brook and fell in.” “And I remember when grandpa whipped you for taking eggs from under his sitting hen.” “Because a little girl about your size—you haven’t grown much—told me to do it.” “Yes, and I ran and hid in the dry-house and fell asleep there. What a time they had finding me.” And Elinor laughed at the recollection. “’Twas old Tige that found you. We never could understand how he opened the dry-house door,” responded Mark. “Ah, those happy, happy days,” sighed Elinor. “Look yonder, Tibby, what a lovely group of ponies.”