Since then her tongue had swept on as relentlessly as a scythe, sparing neither flower nor noxious weed, a movement which it was wise, sometimes, to check.
When, therefore, Martha, with Meg now bounding before her, caught sight of Ann Gossaway's beckoning hand thrust out of the low window of her cottage--the spider-web referred to by Uncle Ephraim--she halted in her walk, lingered a moment as if undecided, expressed her opinion of the dressmaker to Meg in an undertone, and swinging open the gate with its ball and chain, made her way over the grass-plot and stood outside the window, level with the sill.
"Well, it ain't none of my business, of course, Martha Sands," Miss Gossaway began, "and that's just what I said to mother when I come home, but if I was some folks I'd see my company in my parlor, long as I had one, 'stead of hidin' down behind the House o' Refuge.

I said to mother soon's I got in, 'I'm goin' to tell Martha Sands fust minute I see her.

She ain't got no idee how them girls of hers is carryin' on or she'd stop it.' That's what I said, didn't I, mother ?" Martha caught an inarticulate sound escaping from a figure muffled in a blanket shawl, but nothing else followed.
"I thought fust it was you when I heard that draggle-tail dog of yours barkin', but it was only Miss Jane and Bart Holt." "Down on the beach! When ?" asked Martha.

She had not understood a word of Miss Gossaway's outburst.
"Why, yesterday afternoon, of course--didn't I tell ye so?
I'd been down to Fogarty's; it's my week.

Miss Jane and Bart didn't see me--didn't want to.