Keziah turned around. Her hands were dripping. "Are you going home?"
"No," Linnet said. "I don't have a home to go to. I climbed out of the window, remember. And before you feel too pleased about that, it isn't because of you. I'd decided I was never going back to Penn Street before I ever opened your first letter. You only gave me a direction to go in."
That afternoon Mrs. Dimmock came.
She was a big, capable, pink-faced woman in a sunbonnet who drove her own buggy, and she had heard from Fenna Gault by way of her husband, who had been in town the day before, that a lady had come off the Tuesday train for Caleb Morgan, and she had come eleven miles across country to see for herself, and she brought the Reverend Lathrop with her, a thin, kindly, worried young man with a cold. They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and Mrs. Dimmock looked at Linnet the way Fenna had, from hat to boots, only less kindly.
"Well," Mrs. Dimmock said, when the story had been told, or as much of it as Nehemiah chose to tell, which was less than all of it. "Well, it seems to me the Lord has made a way out of this, if people have the sense to take it. Here's Miss Rudd come all this way to be married, and here's Nehemiah with a house and no wife, and here's this girl that needs a woman over her. The Reverend's right here. It could be done by Sunday and nobody need talk."
There was a silence. The Reverend Lathrop coughed into his handkerchief and looked miserable.
"No," Linnet said.
"I beg your pardon?"