96 TROTTY’S WEDDING TOUR.

CHAPTER X.
RUBY’S VISITOR.

) | ERLE did not come the next day. She said she ’d

rather wait till Trotty was well enough to play out of
doors. For a while after this, the stories went into the story-
book smoothly enough, and nothing happened between times
worth telling.

RUBY’S VISITOR.

Her father had gone to the village one night, and left her
quite alone in that bit of a house; it was really very small,
—it did not seem much larger than a dog-kennel; but
it was large enough for two people, especially if one were
such an atom as Ruby. It was a very lonely house, too, for
it stood half-way up a mountain, where the shadow of the pine
forest was darkest, and the great white stretch of snow that
sloped down through it Jay still and untrodden, — still, except
when the icicles clattered sharply down from the trees on it.
Ruby could hear them often, when she sat alone; she could
hear the wind too, sobbing around the house as if its heart
were broken, and then wailing off over miles of mountain
solitude. Sometimes she could hear the chirp of a frightened
bird in itS nest, or the mournful cry of the whippoorwill over