He raised the knocker, and knew when it fell that a girl's heart within responded to it with a wild beat.
He waited until there was a heavy shuffle of feet in the hall and the door opened, and Minister Fair's black servant-woman stood there flaring a candle before his eyes.
"Who be you ?" said she, in her rich drone, which had yet a twang of hostility in it.
Burr Gordon ignored her question.

"Is Miss Dorothy at home ?" said he.
"Yes, she's at home, I s'pose," muttered the woman, grudgingly.

She distrusted this young man as a suitor for Dorothy.

The girl's mother had long been dead, and this old dark woman, whose very thoughts seemed to the village people to move on barbarian pivots of their own, had a jealous guardianship of her which exceeded that of her father.
Now she filled up the doorway before Burr Gordon with her majestic, palpitating bulk, her great black face stiffened back with obstinacy.
It was said that she had been born in Africa, and had been a princess in her own country; and, indeed, she bore herself like one now, and held up her orange-turbaned head as if it were crowned, and bore her candle like a flaming sceptre which brought out strange gleams of color and metallic lustres from her garments and the rows of beads on her black neck.
Burr Gordon made an impatient yet deferential motion to enter.

"I would like to see her a few minutes if she is at home," said he.
The woman muttered something which might have been in her native dialect, the words were so rolled into each other under her thick tongue.