You know, Aunt Cornely, she
is a mighty pretty little trick--and there ain't nothin' bad about the gal.
I jest knowed you and Pap 'ud feel mighty hurt over Sammy doin' you-all
like you was cruel to him--like he had to run away to git married; and I
'lowed I better come and tell you fust."
The "little Huldy gal" was, as Blev Straly had described her, a mighty
pretty little trick, and nothing bad about her. The orphan child of poor
mountaineers, bound out since the death of her parents when she was ten
years old, she had been two years now working for Aunt Randy Card, who kept
the primitive hotel at Hepzibah. Even in this remote region Huldy showed
that wonderful--that irrepressible--upward impulse of young feminine
America, that instinctive affinity for the finer things of life, that
marvellous understanding of graces and refinements, and that pathetic and
persistent groping after them which is the marked characteristic of
America's daughters. The child was not yet sixteen, a fair little thing
with soft ashen hair and honest gray eyes, the pink upon her cheek like
that of a New England girl.
At first this marriage--which had been so unkindly conducted by Sammy, used
by him apparently as a weapon of affront--seemed to bring with it only
good, only happiness.
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