"She went towards the door, Timothy following. But before they got to it, it opened, and somebody come in, at the sight of who Mis' Toplady stopped short and the talk of the rest of us fell away. No stranger, much, comes to Friendship Village without our knowing it, and to have a stranger walk unbeknownst into the very lecture-room of the First Church was a thing we never heard of, without he was a book agent or a travelling man.
"Here, though, was a stranger--and such a stranger. She was so unexpected and so dazzling that it shot through my head she was like a star, taking refuge from all the roughness and the rain outside--a star, so it come in my head, using up its leisure on a cloudy night with peepin' in here and there to give out brightness anyway. The rough, dark cheviot that the girl wore was sort of like a piece of storm-cloud clinging about that brightness--a brightness of wind-rosy face and blowy hair, all uncovered. She stood on the threshold, holding her wet umbrella at arm's length out in the entry.
"'I beg your pardon. Are you ready, Aunt Eleanor?' she asked.
"Mis' Eleanor Emmons turned and looked at her.
"'Robin!' she says. 'Why, you must be wet through.'
"'I'm pretty wet,' says the girl, serene, 'I'm so messy I won't come in. I'll just stop out here on the steps. Don't hurry.'
"'Wait a minute,' Mis' Emmons says. 'Stay where you are then, please, Robin, and meet these people.'
"The girl threw the door wide, and she stepped back into the vestibule, where her umbrella had been trailing little puddles; and she stood there against the big, black background of the night and the village, while Mis' Emmons presented her.
"'This is my niece, Miss Sidney,' she told us. 'She has just come to me to-day--for as long as I can keep her. Will you all come to see her?'
"It wasn't much the way Mis' Sykes had done, singing praises of Miss Beryl Sessions for weeks on end before she'd got there; nor the way I was doing, wondering secret about my unknown niece, and what she'd be like. Mis' Emmons introduced her niece like she'd always been one of us. She said our names over, and we went towards her; and Miss Sidney leaned a little inside the frame of the doorway and put out her hand to us all, a hand that didn't have any glove on and that in spite of the rain, was warm.