The Quilt of Happiness by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Old Miss Roxanna Lyman lived half a mile up the river road and an eighth of a mile up a lane that led from it and stopped at her dooryard. Why the house was ever built there was a mystery. If you were a stranger in Riverboro and were walking up to play with the Simpson children and found everybody away from home, and had spied high-bush blueberries a little farther on, and chokecherry trees in full bearing in a green lane, that you had never noticed before, and had strayed along the grass-grown road that had known hardly a wagon wheel for years, you would finally have passed an obscuring clump of trees and come suddenly upon Miss Roxy's little black house.

At least that was what Rebecca did. The door was open, andsitting in a rocking-chair in the tiny entry was, as Rebecca reported to Miss Jane later, "the very most sorrowfullest old lady any one had ever seen. " No one could have told her age. She was slight and spare; she was huddled in a gray shawl; the wrinkles in her face -- wrinkles of pain, anxiety, grief, poverty, and foreboding -- fairly made a lattice-work on the skin. You knew by looking at her that no one had gone out from the black house in the morning and no one was coming back to it at night.