Paul Ralston by Mary Jane Holmes

She was standing in the doorway of her cottage, in Oak City, one morning in May, watching the early boat as it came slowly up to the wharf and counting the passengers who landed from it. There were twenty in all,-some with their bags and umbrellas, walking briskly away in different directions, as if they knew where they were going and were in a hurry to get there,-while a few, who evidently did not know where they were going, stopped to parley with two or three hackmen on the stand in front of a hotel. These were undoubtedly strangers seeking information with regard to accommodations, and Miss Hansford decided that the season was likely to be a good one when people began to arrive so early. By a good season she meant her rooms full of lodgers, with plenty of money coming to her weekly, and not as was the case the previous summer,-barely enough to pay her taxes and insurance. As yet most of the cottages were closed and looked gloomy and somber, with their barred doors and boarded windows and no stir of life around them. But there were signs of the coming summer in the warm spring air which blew up from the sea. Crocuses and daffodils were blossoming in the borders and hyacinths in the beds in the parks, where the grass was fresh and green, and in a short time the place would shake off its winter lethargy and be alive and gay once more. Like many other people, Miss Hansford's bones were her barometer. Whatever they indicated, whether physically or of matters outside her own personality, was pretty sure to come to pass, and as she counted the people crossing the pier she was conscious of a sudden exhilaration of spirits which boded well for the future. From living alone more than half the time she had acquired a habit of talking to herself, and frequently indulged in long conversations of questions and answers, in which she sometimes differed as sharply from her imaginary interlocutor or respondent as she would have done had they been real flesh and blood.

Seating herself upon the piazza, which extended on three sides of her cottage, and still watching the boat now moving out to sea, she said aloud: "Yes, I begin to feel it in my bones that it's going to be an uncommon summer. Something out of the usual run. I don't know, though, why I need be so anxious. I've enough to carry me through, and more, too, and I don't want 'em to fight over the little there will be left when I'm gone. There ain't many to fight, either. The nearest of kin is Roger, and I vowed I wouldn't give him a thing when he married Lucy Potter."