Читать книгу Barren Ground онлайн

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She was a shy girl, gentle and amiable, yet there was a barely perceptible note of condescension in her manner. "Just because she's rich and I'm poor, she thinks she is better than I am," Dorinda thought disdainfully, as she went up the steps.

While she was weighing and measuring the groceries, Bob Ellgood came from the post office (which consisted of a partition, with a window, in one corner of the store) and stopped by the counter to speak to her. He was a heavy, slow-witted young man, kind, temperate, and good-looking in a robust, beefy fashion. Because he was the eldest son of James Ellgood, he was regarded as desirable by the girls in the neighbourhood, and Dorinda remembered that, only a few Sundays ago, she had looked at him in church and asked herself, with a start of expectancy, "What if he should be the right one after all?" She laughed softly over the pure absurdity of the recollection, and a gleam of admiration flickered in the round, marble-like eyes of the young man.

"I hope the Greylocks' steer didn't harm your father's plant beds," he said abruptly.