"Good idea!" vouchsafed Sam Slawson senior, speaking for the first time.
As soon as Mrs. Peckett was well out of sight and hearing, Martha turned reprovingly upon her husband.
"Only way to get rid of her," he answered succinctly.
"Oh!" said Martha, going to the cupboard, where she kept her store of simple home remedies. "Now, if _you're_ ready, _I_ am. An', young Sammy, you run, an' tell your gran'mother to give you childern bread an' milk for your suppers. Your father an' I are goin' out. We mayn't be back till late."
It was dusk when Martha reached the Crewe place.
As she turned in at the entrance-gate, she thought she saw a spark of light prick out through the darkness of one of the upper-story windows, but the next instant it disappeared, and the gloomy house stood formidably looming up against its background of dense foliage, facing her, as with a challenge, as black as ever.
Martha Slawson was not one to be intimidated. She plodded steadily along the driveway, regardless of the strange sensation of shifty gravel crunching beneath feet used to hard city pavements, the thickening shadows to eyes accustomed to the glare of electric-lighted streets, and the soft, surreptitious stirrings of she-knew-not-what among the underbrush to ears familiar with the roar of the Elevated, the clang and dash of passing surface cars.
"I don't see the use o' them sheds they build to the front doors o' some o' the houses, in these parts, which they call'm _port co-shares_, Sam tells me. You can take it from me, they're like to break your bones, mountin' the high step o' them," she mused, panting with the effort it had taken to hoist her heavy frame from the level of the ground to that of the house-door.
"Them swell ladies must be considerable of acrobats, to do it graceful. I know _I_ couldn't."
She smoothed down her disordered garments, and dusted off her grimy palms, before venturing to search, in the darkness, for the bell. She found it readily enough, but it was some time before she heard the chain-bolt withdrawn from within, a key turned in a resisting lock, a door unlatched. Then, the door swung open inward, on its heavy hinges, and Martha found herself face to face with what she described next day to Cora as, "the livin' image o' that marble statute in the Metropolitan Museum, down home. The girl in the flowin' robes, holdin' a queer-lookin' thing, which its own mother wouldn't reco'nize it for a lamp, in her hand. You told me her name. Sykey, you said it was, though not spelled that way on the slob she stood on, I noticed. But, I take your word for it. Well, if this young lady wasn't just like Sykey, lamp an' all! You'd never know the difference, exceptin' for complexion."