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Six Girls and Bob: A Story of Patty-Pans and Green Fields

by Marion Ames Taggart · English · Gutenberg #47655 · 455,526 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Six Girls and Bob: A Story of Patty-Pans and Green Fields

Author: Marion Ames Taggart

Illustrator: William F. Stecher


        
Release date: December 13, 2014 [eBook #47655]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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SIX GIRLS AND BOB


      *      *      *      *      *      *

   BOOKS BY
   MARION AMES TAGGART


   THE SIX GIRLS SERIES

       SIX GIRLS AND BOB. A Story of Patty-Pans
       and Green Fields. 330 pages.

       SIX GIRLS AND THE TEA ROOM. A Story.
       316 pages.

       SIX GIRLS GROWING OLDER. A Story.
       331 Pages.

       SIX GIRLS AND THE SEVENTH ONE. A
       Story. 358 pages.

       BETTY GASTON, THE SEVENTH GIRL.
       A Story. 352 pages.

       SIX GIRLS AND BETTY. A Story. 320 pages.

       SIX GIRLS GROWN UP. A Story. 343 pages.

       These volumes are attractively illustrated and bound
       uniformly. Price, $1.50 each.

      *      *      *      *      *      *


[Illustration: "THIS SUNNY LITTLE MAIDEN WAS BENDING ABSORBED OVER THE
GAS RANGE"]


SIX GIRLS AND BOB

A Story of Patty-Pans and Green Fields

by

MARION AMES TAGGART

Author of "The Little Grey House," "The
Wyndham Girls," "Miss Lochinvar," etc.


Illustrated by William F. Stecher







[Illustration: logo]

W. A. Wilde Company
Boston      Chicago

Copyright, 1906
By W. A. Wilde Company

All rights reserved

SIX GIRLS AND BOB




                             _To Gertrude
                        In Loving Remembrance_




CONTENTS

    CHAPTER                                                PAGE

        I. THE FOURTH FLOOR, EAST                            11

       II. FIRE, AND OTHER ESCAPES                           27

      III. KEREN-HAPPUCH, THE FIRST                          43

       IV. AN ANGEL IN DISGUISE                              58

        V. TAKING POSSESSION                                 75

       VI. MAKING THE BEST OF IT                             91

      VII. THE DOVE'S ALIGHTING                             105

     VIII. GRETTA                                           121

       IX. JUNE'S PERFECT DAYS                              135

        X. HAPPIE'S TEMPTATION                              151

       XI. HAPPIE'S CHOICE                                  167

      XII. LAURA'S PHILANTHROPY                             184

     XIII. HUMILITY, CALVES AND GINGER POP                  202

      XIV. AN ARK ADRIFT?                                   217

       XV. THE PROMISE OF THE GREEN BRANCH                  234

      XVI. A PRANK----                                      251

     XVII. AND ITS CONSEQUENCES                             267

    XVIII. THE BITTENBENDER TRUNK                           282

      XIX. DISPOSSESSION AND POSSESSION                     298

       XX. AT THE SUBSIDENCE OF THE WATERS                  315




                             ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                           PAGE

    "THIS SUNNY LITTLE MAIDEN WAS BENDING ABSORBED
    OVER THE GAS RANGE"           _Frontispiece_             14

    "'HOW DO YOU DO, MARGERY?'"                              51

    "'CAN'T YOU EVER COME TO SEE ME?'"                      129

    "HE FOLLOWED LAURA TO THE FRONT DOOR"                   191

    "THE GIRLS CROWDED AROUND TO SEE WHAT WAS REVEALED"     290




                           SIX GIRLS AND BOB




                               CHAPTER I

                        THE FOURTH FLOOR, EAST


"HOW can you get twelve feet into eight feet, no matter how good you
are in arithmetic?" asked Happie Scollard, a trifle impatiently.

"You'd have to be pretty poor in arithmetic to try it. Even home-taught
children ought to know something about putting greater into lesser,"
observed Bob. "Would you mind telling us what you're driving at,
Keren-happuch, my dear?"

Happie groaned. "This room is quite squeedged enough with us six
Scollards in it, without crowding in my dreadful name, Robert, my
dear," she retorted. "What I was driving at was a harmless little
_humorous_ joke. This kitchen is eight feet wide, and we have twelve
feet, we six, haven't we? I was wishing we had more space to stand on;
that's all."

"That's right; always make _humorous_ jokes," approved Bob. "I've heard
lots of jokes that hadn't a touch of humor. Yours isn't so very--but
never mind! You know we needn't put all the twelve feet into the eight.
This room is nine feet long. What's the matter with putting a few of
our feet down the length of it? Say seven of the twelve, for instance?"

Happie laughed. "I hadn't thought of dividing them that way," she said.
"But the worst of standing any of your feet lengthwise of the room is
that it brings some of you in between the range and the sink, and then
I can't stir the fudge. Though to be sure if you all stand widthwise I
can't get to the closet."

"How could you put seven one way and five the other? They'd have to go
in twos, because we've each got two feet, don't you see?" asked Polly
suddenly. She had been turning Bob's suggestion over in her mind and
had announced her discovery with her usual serious manner. In all her
nine years of life with her nonsense-loving elder brother and sisters,
Polly had not learned that they were not always to be taken literally.

"Good for you, pretty Polly!" exclaimed Bob. "I believe you're right!
And you know how many are left when you take seven from twelve, don't
you? What's the matter with Happie? Isn't she all right?"

"This is a dear little kitchen, Happie. We all said so when we came to
look at the flat! And we were so glad it was sunny!" said Margery, the
sweet seventeen years-old sister who mothered the little band during
their mother's daily absence.

"I'm still glad, sweet Peggy," said Happie. "But when we looked at the
flat, we didn't realize how very tiny this kitchen was--we hadn't
put the saucepans and things into the cupboard, you see! But I'm not
breaking my vows. I'm still thankful that we have our funny, cozy
little drawn-out fourth floor home. But it is a little kitchen for six,
and everybody always packs into it when I make fudge."

"You ought to be flattered," said Bob. "How is it coming on this time?"

"Not as fast as usual; there isn't much pressure on the gas," replied
Happie, lifting her pan to peer anxiously at the fragrant brown mass it
held.

She was a pretty creature, not with a regular and easily defined
prettiness, but with a charm of feature, coloring and expression that
was more potent than orthodox beauty. She had brown hair, that in the
shade looked the color of a ripe chestnut. In the sun it turned a
splendid copper color, as if the chestnut had blazed up in the brazier.
It was hair all crinkles and wrinkles, trying to curl as nature meant
it to, and as its owner distinctly meant it not to curl. It waved
around rosy cheeks in which the dimples came and went so fast that
they looked as if they too were curly, like the hair, and it shaded
brown eyes that could laugh and flash and cloud sorrowfully, but which
ordinarily shone with a warm, steady light that put one in mind of a
glowing hearth fire. Happie could not have had a more appropriate name
than her nickname, for she was a veritable ray of sunshine, brave and
cheerful and unselfish, good with that natural tendency to noble aims
and thoughts that seems in rare natures to be at one with the tendency
of flowers to clothe themselves in fragrance and beauty. She could get
angry, and sometimes did, but she never could do unkind or mean things;
she was a loyal, pure-hearted, clever little woman of fourteen, with
so many talents that she had no special one, and her mother felt that
when the time came for her to earn her bread, as all the Scollards must
do, it might be hard to decide for what too-versatile Happie was best
fitted.

Just now this sunny little maiden was bending absorbed over the gas
range, her face decidedly red, her sweet lips deserving the epithet
for purely external reasons, as well as for their pleasant curves,
while her right hand stirred the mixture in a pan which her left hand
slightly lifted above the circular blue flame.

Margery--Margaret--reclined against the drop shelf which was the
space-economizing substitute for a kitchen table. She was a graceful
young creature, with a serious look on her madonna-like face, brought
there by her early acquaintance with responsibility and anxiety.

Bob, next to Margery in seniority, sat astride of the only chair the
tiny kitchen admitted. A fine, square-shouldered specimen of a boy
nearing sixteen he was; open-browed, bright-eyed, overflowing with fun,
yet with a certain steadiness of manner that spoke him trustworthy, as
became a boy who had been left the head of a family by his father's
death four years before.

Laura, Happie's successor in the birth record of the family Bible,
toyed elegantly with a fork, but cast rapid, furtive glances at
the fudge, betraying the shallowness of the indifference which an
over-weening sense of the dignity of her twelve years impelled her to
assume. She was a pale, thin girl, with a discontented and sensitive
mouth, and an abundance of foolish affectations that made her seem like
an alien among the cheerful, sensible young Scollards.

Mary--Polly, as she was always called, was the most stolidly
sensible little creature of the family. A round-faced, broad-browed,
sweet-tempered, plump little body was Polly, never in anybody's way,
always to be relied upon for an errand, very fond of housewifely tasks
of which she assumed her full share in the household, though she
boasted but nine years of age.

Penelope, baby Penny, ended the Scollard list, winding up the ranks at
four years, an imaginative, lively little person, not prone to scrapes,
but fond of mischief, and with an ability to amuse and to take care of
herself remarkable, considering there were five older children ready
and glad to spoil her with petting.

The sensitive, delicate mother of this flock had been left a widow
when Penny was a wee baby. There had been nothing for her gifted,
impractical husband to leave her but the memory of a perfect love and
a beautiful life, spent rather in the pursuit of ideals than of money.
Without a murmur this woman, strong of soul, though weak of body,
had taken up the burden of her profound grief and the support of her
children. She had many accomplishments, and her knowledge of languages
stood her in good stead. Every day she journeyed down the subway from
her fourth floor nest in an up-town apartment house, and earned her own
and her children's bread as the foreign correspondent of a large firm,
coming back weary every night during the hardest hours of the crowded
subway travel to her flat, where, after the dinner which her children
had prepared, she spent each evening giving them the lessons for which
she could no longer afford teachers. It was not strange that the
Scollards worshiped their mother with the love she so richly deserved,
the love of recognition of a noble woman, as well as the natural love
of children for their mother.

Happie's fudge boiled up suddenly, and suddenly Laura spoke, breaking a
silence that had lasted for several minutes.

"I think I should like to be called Laure," she said.

"Law! What for?" cried Happie, promptly, blowing away vigorously on the
spoonful of fudge which she had taken out to test.

"It's less common than Laura and more musical," said Laura pensively.
"Laure sounds elegant."

"It sounds silly," said Polly instantly.

"It sounds as if you could put your finger through it anywhere; I
don't like French names for American and English girls," added Happie.

"I like names that sound like beautiful music," said Laura, who really
was talented musically, but who was pitiably conscious of the fact. "I
was making up the loveliest little song--the sweetest air!--and I was
writing the words too. I said:

    'She shone afar,
    Like a golden star,
    My angel Laure.'

And then I had to stop, because it ought to have been Laura, and Laure
wouldn't have rhymed. If only it was Laure now----"

"It wouldn't have rhymed, even if it had been," interrupted Happie, not
too patiently. "Can't you hear that _afar_ and _star_ don't rhyme with
_Laure_?"

"And what's the matter with writing songs and poems to some other girl
beside yourself?" suggested Bob. "You might have said: 'My angel Bar,'
for instance, and pretended the angel's name was Barbara. For goodness'
sake, don't be a goose, Laura! You're nearly in your 'teens, as you so
often remind us, and you ought to stop being so sentimental."

"You're not musical, Bob," said Laura, so pityingly, and with such an
air of shedding light on the whole question that they all shouted.

"Fudge's done!" announced Happie triumphantly, giving a few last,
furious beats to the mixture turning delightfully thick and sugary
in the pan. "Bring on the pans, Polly, and, Bob, will you put it out
on the fire escape till it gets cool enough to go on the ice without
melting our entire stock? I've got to rest and cool my face."

Her lieutenants meekly obeyed, and Happie dropped on the chair which
Bob vacated, fanning herself vigorously with a paper.

"I hope you haven't harmed your complexion, child," said Margery with
her elder sisterly air, as she surveyed Happie's flaming cheeks.

"Fireproof!" Happie replied carelessly. "Sunproof and freckleproof
too; you know I never burn or freckle as you do, Margery. That comes
of having golden hair and peach blossom tints. I'm betwixt and
between--coloring, age, height, cleverness, looks, everything, so I
just slip through, and nothing touches me. I don't care! I like being
fourteen and not having to think of skin or anything! I'd rather change
places with Penny than with you, Peggy, but the worst of it is in three
years I'll be as old as you are now."

"I like to feel that I am almost a young lady," said Margery placidly,
surveying with entire satisfaction the hem of her dress resting on the
floor as she leaned against the shelf. "I believe it is interesting to
be grown-up. At least I ought to be of more use to motherkins then. And
I should like to have a pretty house and entertain people beautifully,
so they'd be perfectly happy visiting me." And pretty Margery sighed
involuntarily, remembering the small flat which was her home, and which
promised no gratification of her hospitable instincts.

"I shouldn't care for that," said Laura, taking up the theme with the
readiness to discuss grown-up plans all little girls feel. "It doesn't
mean much, just to entertain! What I should want would be to give
people something better than dinners and visits. I mean to sing to
people, my own songs, and play to them my own music and all the other
composers'----"

"Why so modest, Laura? Why don't you say all the other _great_
composers?" inquired Bob blandly, withdrawing his head from the window,
having deposited the pans of fudge on the fire escape. "If it comes
to swapping ambitions, mine is to go to college, and it looks as if I
could go, now doesn't it? So Robert the Impatient, must make the best
of it."

"And of himself," added Margaret with her gentle smile, and the half
motherly look that made her grown-up air and elder sisterly manner very
attractive.

"I'm going to have a hospital for hurt cats and dogs," announced Polly.

"I believe you will," laughed Happie. "I have so many dreams I couldn't
possibly say which was my pet one, but I suppose I'll just amount to
nothing, but keep house for all of you when you want to come home
between doing great deeds."

"Oh, you!" said Bob decidedly. "You don't have to do great things;
you're all right just being Happie! I guess you're sure to do great
things and never find it out."

"Yes," added Margery, lovingly. "You are not only Happie yourself, you
know, but you are our happiness--that's what mother says, and I wish it
could be said of me."

"Base flattery!" said Happie shaking her shining head. "It doesn't have
to be said of you, dear, because it's plain to be seen. I believe I'd
like a chicken farm when I grow up."

"Yes, and grow broilers for the market, and take to your bed every
time one had its head cut off--I think I see you!" cried Bob. "No
country, nor farming for me anyway. I want college, and then business
among people. Wouldn't I hate to live where I drove down once a day to
get the mail and to 'see the flyer go through,' as they used to up at
Pennyroyal last year? Do you remember how they used to talk about that
express train? And how they would talk horse while they waited for it?
No, sir; no country for me. I'd rather go to sea."

"The country is beautiful, but I should hate to give up all the city
advantages," said Margery thoughtfully.

"Why there wouldn't be any concerts, nor anything in the country!"
exclaimed Laura. "And who could you play and sing to? They would rather
hear that awful tune the man sings to the trained bears, and plays on
that horrid little pipe the poor things dance to! Why, I'd die if I
lived in the country!"

"I never knew, the Scollards had Irish blood, 'my angel Laure,' but
that was a bull all right," said Bob.

"Well, I _should_ die after I'd lived there long enough for it to kill
me," maintained Laura stoutly. And she could not see why her brother
and sisters laughed.

"I think mother looks as if she would be better if we could live in the
country," said Margery, her face clouding with anxiety. "She looks so
tired lately it worries me dreadfully."

"She couldn't support us in the country, she says, and a suburb costs
more than a flat, adding fare and coal to the rent," said Bob. "I too
think the blessed woman is not up to the mark, Margery."

"Ah, don't!" cried Happie sharply. "Where is Penny? I just missed her."

"'Way in the front with Dorée," said Polly. "She's watching somebody
moving in. There is a van at the door. I guess she couldn't have
smelled the fudge."

"I think so, too, Polly," laughed Happie. "My goodness, that clock's
stopped! It must be time we were getting dinner! Go see what time it
is, Polly, please."

"Quarter to six!" Polly called back from the middle of the flat.
"They're taking in a basket that looks as if it had a cat in it; I
wonder if it's yellow, too?"

The "too" of Polly's remark referred to the Scollards' own beloved
kitten, as yellow as a golden nugget, and named Jeunesse Dorée,
obviously from his color.

Margery and Happie did not stop to bestow a passing thought upon the
new inmates of the house, their fellow flat-dwellers, nor their cat,
but sprang to get out the agate saucepans for their cooking, and to
hurry away the implements of fudge-making, for it was fifteen minutes
past their time for beginning to get dinner, and they prided themselves
on not keeping their mother waiting when she came home at night from
her hard day's work.

Happie enveloped herself in an ample apron and fell to peeling potatoes
as if her life depended on getting them out of their jackets in a
twinkling. Margery quietly, but speedily, put the meat in its pan and
floured it delicately, then knelt before the oven, lighted its burners
and slid the pan into place, devoutly hoping that the tenants on the
lower floors would not require so much gas for their dinners that
night as to lower the pressure and retard further the Scollards' tardy
roasting.

Just behind her was the door of the dumb waiter, with the mouth-piece
of its whistle beside it. From this whistle there suddenly issued a
blood-curdling shriek, and Margery tumbled over backward, while Happie
jumped to her feet, upsetting potatoes, peelings, pan of water and all
on the spotless floor.

"Oh, that fearful whistle!" Happie cried, crimson with anger and the
reaction from her fright. "If I lived here nine hundred and ninety-nine
years, I never should get used to it!"

"Nor I," murmured Margery feebly, scraping up Happie's scattered
peelings with the knife she had dropped, not rising, but turning her
discomfiture to profit as she sat. "It's so sharp and so sudden!"

"They ought to blow softly to announce that they are going to blow
hard," suggested Bob, as he opened the door to answer the summons. But
he had jumped himself.

"It may be a waiter, but it's certainly not a _dumb_ waiter," observed
Happie, pursuing a truant potato to the corner by the ice box.

"It makes me perfectly blasé," sighed Laura, holding her side as she
took the napkins from their drawer.

"Blasé! Oh, Laura, when will you learn to use words right, or to use
only those you understand?" laughed Margery pulling herself up by the
back of the chair.

Bob was leaning down the dumb waiter shaft, and a voice arose from its
depths.

"Groc'ries fer you!" it called in the unspellable accent of New York's
east side.

"I guess not," Bob called back. "Wrong whistle."

"From Lichtenzeit's," insisted the voice.

"No," called Bob.

"Top floor. Gordon," the voice shouted angrily. And as Bob leaned down
further to explain that he was a Scollard, the dumb waiter began to
ascend with rapid clatter, and further parley was impossible.

"It's not only not dumb, Happie, but it's not even a waiter," said
Bob turning away with a disgusted expression. "You see it's coming up
without waiting to find out where it's going. There isn't any one in
the house named Gordon."

The waiter stopped with a rattle of its ropes, and the voice below
called up: "Take 'em off; they're fer you."

"Look here, you chump," called Bob. "They're not mine. There isn't
a Gordon in this whole house." But as he spoke the door across from
the Scollards opened, and a boy appeared, grinning cheerfully at his
neighbor.

"You're not quite right there, old man," he said. "There is a Gordon in
the house, and I'm he. I'm one of him, at least--there's another, and
their mother. All right; I've got the stuff. Go ahead. Farewell, vale,
ta ta. Blow the left hand whistle next time."

The new boy straightened himself from delivering these last remarks
down the waiter-shaft and smiled anew at Bob. "We've just moved in. The
last of our household effects are even now bumping the paper off the
front hall--the van men find them bulky. Hope we'll meet again." He
cast his eye beyond Bob into the sunny kitchen where pretty Margery and
Happie were working like stingless bees.

"All right. Hope so, too," said Bob. And the doors shut simultaneously
on both sides of the dumb waiter.

"He looks the right sort," observed Bob.

"I'm sorry the flat across is let, though. It has been such a rest not
having the men blow our whistle for the one over there," sighed Margery.

Happie had beaten up a cake to be eaten with her blanc mange of
the morning's making. She was pouring the mixture into her sheet
of cup-shaped tins, and was not interested in the subject of new
neighbors. She paused with her bowl held sidewise in the air, and with
her spoon resting on its side as she guided the yellow mixture into its
destination. "I've got it!" she exclaimed jubilantly.

"Eureka, Keren-happuch, my dear," corrected Bob. "What have you got?"

"The name for our flat," said Happie. The Scollards had been trying
ever since they had taken possession of it to find a name for their
habitation, "because," Happie explained, "all residences of any account
had names, and she wanted her estate to be no exception."

"What is it?" asked Margery, and Laura paused in the doorway with the
bread plate in her hand to hear the answer.

"Patty-pans!" cried Happie triumphantly. "Don't you see that it
is exactly what the flat is like?" She held up her baking tins to
illustrate. "See," she went on, "how the rooms come along, one after
the other, just precisely like these patty-pan cups? This is The
Patty-Pans, or Patty-Pans-on-the-Hudson--only a few blocks off, at any
rate, and that doesn't matter!"

"It's the very thing!" cried Bob appreciatively, and Margery laughed
and agreed.

"It's not at all pretty," said Laura, whose sense of humor was
defective. But she got no further with her objection. The little
electric bell on the wall rang thrice, and all the Scollards in the
rear rushed through the narrow hall, and were met at the door by Polly
from the front, and Penny with Dorée in her arms.

This triple ring meant that the children's real day, the only part of
the day in which the sun fully shone for them, although it began after
sunset, had dawned, for it announced their mother's home-coming at
night.




                              CHAPTER II

                        FIRE, AND OTHER ESCAPES


ONE'S mother never has the appearance of any particular age. She does
not look precisely young, because hers is the face to which our baby
eyes are raised for comfort and guidance, it is from her that we
receive and hope for all things. So it is impossible to realize that
she is quite young. On the other hand the familiar, beloved face never
wears the look of age, no matter how wrinkled it be, nor how far we
have traveled from childhood. It is too dear, too perfectly the spring
that quenches our thirst for unfailing love ever to look to us withered
and age-stricken as it must to strangers. The young Scollards had never
stopped to consider whether their mother was quite elderly, or very
youthful--her age was swallowed up in the fact of her motherhood. In
reality Charlotte Scollard was but just approaching the milestone of
the fourth decade. She was a pale, slenderly built woman, with a worn,
sweet face, like Margery's, but older and saddened. It wore a look of
ill-health which her children saw too frequently to recognize fully,
though the three eldest half perceived it at times, with a tightening
of fear around their hearts.

Polly and Penny clung around their mother's waist as she entered, Bob
and Margery encircled her from each side with their loving arms, while
Happie hugged her breathless, and Laura vainly strove for an opening
for her own welcome.

"Such a dear little home! Such joy to get home to you, my blessings!"
said the mother, as she said each night. "Have you been good and happy
all this day?"

She went into the front room which was that nondescript allowed by
flat life, neither drawing-room, library nor living-room, but a little
of each. It was a pretty room, made so by its furnishing of books and
pictures, and the mother looked about her, feeling anew that it was
well worth the effort that taxed her slender strength to the utmost to
maintain this nest and her nestlings within it.

"We've found a name for the flat at last, motherkins!" cried Happie, as
she removed her mother's hat pins, while Laura and Margery unbuttoned
her coat, and the two least girls pulled off a glove from each hand.

"Happie has," corrected Margery. "It's a nice, cozy, funny little name,
just like this family."

"Tell me," smiled Mrs. Scollard.

"Patty-Pans!" announced Happie triumphantly. "I thought of it when I
was pouring my cake into the cup pans. Don't you know that these flats
are precisely like a patty-pan, every room following after and joining
on to the next one the way the cups do in those sheets?"

"I see the resemblance." Mrs. Scollard laughed, and the weariness went
out of her face for the moment as her eyes danced. "Shall we have a die
cut for our letter paper: 'Patty-Pans,' and printed in bright silver
like new tins? Only I'm afraid our correspondents might think that all
our letters should be dated April first!"

"And the flat across is rented; the family came in to-day," Bob said,
adding his information to the small fund of entertainment which it was
the children's custom to amass daily for their mother's return.

"Oh, me! I hope they are not people who will play the piano all the
evening when we are at our lessons!" Mrs. Scollard sighed, remembering
past troubles.

"Two big boys and their mother; I guess not," said Bob succinctly. "The
one we saw across the dumb waiter looked a good sort, and full of fun.
I got home to-day earlier, mother. Mr. Felton told me that if you would
agree to letting me come for all day he would make it worth our while."

"I am glad to hear that, Bob; it shows that he likes you. But I will
never consent to giving you up for all day to earning, leaving no time
for your studies, until we are absolutely driven to it. As long as I
can earn enough to support us all--with strict economy, to be sure, but
enough--I will not let my only son lose his chance for an education.
Half a day is all that I will let you spend at the office, dear Bob.
But thank Mr. Felton for me; tell him I am glad indeed that he thinks
you worth having all day. Now, I must get ready for dinner. I hope it
is very good and abundant, lassies, for I am pitiably hungry." Mrs.
Scollard rose as she spoke, and pulled aside the sliding-door at the
end of the room. It led into her own chamber, lighted by the glass in
this door, the second room of the series of seven, arranged, as Happie
had discovered, in true patty-pan order.

The girls ran through to the kitchen to serve the dinner, while Penny
and Dorée lingered with the mother, waiting for the special petting to
which, as the baby, Penny was entitled.

"I always think of how the girls in Little Women got ready for their
mother to come home, don't you? When we are waiting for our marmee, I
mean," said Happie, arranging her little cakes on the delicate Limoges
plate. "They swept up the hearth and put their mother's slippers down
to warm. I don't think flats are really homes; you can't do that kind
of comfy, homey things in a flat."

"But our mother can come home just as truly, and that is the only
important thing. We are fortunate to have a home," said Margery, with a
suggestion of reproach in her voice.

"Mercy! Don't I know it," retorted Happie. "But won't you be glad when
we are able to make a home for mother instead of her making one for
us?"

"Next winter I shall do something towards it," said Margery in a tone
of quiet conviction. "You will be old enough to keep house then without
my help."

"I'd rather be the one to go out; I'm better fitted for it," said
Happie. "Dinner is served, Mrs. Scollard, mum," she added, putting her
head out of the dining-room door, and calling down the three-foot hall
which carried sound like a tunnel.

Mrs. Scollard did not prove her own assertion as to her appetite. The
children, anxiously watching her, saw her taste her food, and push it
away uneaten, telegraphing their uneasiness to one another as she did
so.

"You said you were hungry, dear Deceiver," Happie reproached her at
last.

"I was, dear; I felt as if I could not wait for my dear girls' good
things, but when I see them I cannot eat, although I appreciate the
perfect seasoning, and how fortunate I am in my cooks." Mrs. Scollard
laughed a little as she spoke, and her eyes rested lovingly on Margery
and Happie, but she only broke a corner of one of the golden patty-pan
cakes, and took bird-like tastes of the delicate blanc mange. It seemed
to the older girls and Bob that the pallor of her face, the shadows
under her eyes, the droop of her lips had never been so apparent.

Before they had time to dwell on the thought and what it might
portend, there came a great clatter from the kitchen, and Dorée flew
into the dining-room with his golden fur so electrified that he looked
like a four-legged sunflower, with very little difference in his size
and shape at any point.

"What under the canopy----" Bob began, jumping up from the table and
running out, followed by his sisters.

Somebody was hammering madly on the dumb waiter door with a competent
stick. Bob opened the door emphatically, and there, in the opposite
doorway, stood the boy whom they had seen in the afternoon, his stick
raised for further pounding, but with a broad smile on his face that
did not suggest anything in the least malicious.

"Say, what's the matter with you?" demanded Bob.

"Would you be so very kind as to return our cat?" asked the boy with
exaggerated mildness.

"We haven't got your cat; that's ours," said Bob, pointing over his
shoulder to where Jeunesse Dorée was standing sniffing the situation
with greatly elongated body, having returned to investigate what had
frightened him, with true feline nervous courage and curiosity.

"'Tis true, my lord, and pity 'tis 'tis true,'" returned the boy.
"For that's a beauty cat. Ours is merely a cat of many colors, but we
are fond of him. He is on your fire escape, having leaped across from
this one. From the sounds I have heard, I think he has upset a pan of
something, though it's too dark for me to see."

"Oh, my fudge!" cried Happie, and threw up the window.

A tiger cat immediately jumped into the kitchen, to Dorée's intense
disapproval, and Happie fished her pan of fudge from between the slats
of the fire escape floor, where it had lodged, caught by the transverse
slats on its way down to the ground. The candy bore the unmistakable
imprint of the tiger cat's "paddy-paw" feet, and Happie surveyed it
with chagrin, while Polly stroked the interloper, and Penny clasped
struggling Dorée to her breast, to prevent his manifest intention to
punish his neighbor.

"Was it your fudge? I'm awfully sorry," said the boy across. "I guess
Whoop-la sat in it."

"I guess so too," returned Happie with a laugh. "It's hard luck after
broiling one's face to make it. Hard luck for you, too, because we'd
have offered you some if it hadn't been spoiled."

"That's noble of you, but I'm afraid you wouldn't, because I shouldn't
have knocked on your dumb waiter door, and so we wouldn't have met if
Whoop-la hadn't gone over. That is, we shouldn't have met till after
you had eaten up all the fudge. Of course we were bound to scrape
acquaintance. Would you mind handing me Whoop-la?" The boy bowed as
he spoke, and his eyes laughed in spite of his preternaturally solemn
manner.

"Such a name for a cat!" exclaimed Bob. He picked up the tiger cat and
passed him across to his master, leaning well over the ledge of the
dumb waiter to do so. "Suppose you come around to see us tonight," Bob
suggested. "We generally study and recite evenings, but to-night is
Saturday, and a holiday. Won't you come?"

"I suppose the correct thing is for you to call on me first, you
being the oldest--no, the older inhabitant, but I'll waive ceremony.
I'd better waive it, because there isn't anything in this flat but
bedlam--boxes and chairs you can't tell apart, burlap, and excelsior. I
couldn't very well ask you over. My mother and younger brother haven't
come yet, so I'm a little lonely. I will come around, if you don't
mind, and thank you for asking me." The boy received his cat with hands
so considerate of cat-nerves that the Scollard girls, noting, approved
of him at once.

"Just give us time to scurry the dishes away," laughed Happie. "We're
are own servants, and we couldn't entertain you while we were at work.
Give us half an hour for finishing up, and then come."

"It would entertain me very much to watch you work," said this queer
boy, "but I'll wait. Good-bye for thirty harrowing minutes. My watch
goes fast; you won't mind?"

The Scollards laughed as Bob shut the dumb waiter door.

"He's a character," cried Bob, elated at the prospect of his visitor.

Mrs. Scollard bore off Penny to bed, which she shared with her mother,
and lying down beside the baby for her nightly story-telling, fell
asleep beside her from sheer exhaustion.

Margery, Happie and Laura washed and wiped the dishes, and Polly put
them away, with Bob's help for the higher closet shelves. They worked
so fast that only twenty of the thirty minutes were consumed by the
task. They were rather excited by the coming of a caller of their own
age. Their mother discouraged them from making acquaintances lightly.
Living, as they did, in a neighborhood of low rents and crowded
apartment-houses, she feared for them contact with young minds less
carefully shielded from the knowledge of evil than their own, dreaded
their possible contact with manners and morals such as she would not
have had them imitate.

Happie's bright hair was curly and moist around her temples from the
hasty dash of water which she had thrown over her face, and Margery was
daintily drying her fingers one by one when the bell rang, so prompt
was the new boy in keeping his appointment to the moment. Polly opened
the door for him, and in he walked, hailed by a shout of laughter from
Bob which brought the girls in at once, although Margery was conscious
of lingering dampness around her little finger.

The new boy had made a label for himself of a box cover, and on it he
had written his name, "Ralph Gordon," in very bold letters for all who
ran to read. This improvement upon a visiting card he had hung around
his neck, so that there could not be an instant's doubt as to whom the
Scollards were entertaining.

"Now if you'd only stand by the dumb waiter whistles in the cellar
with that thing on, we'd never be troubled with your groceries as
we were to-day," said Bob, shaking hands with the arrival. "Wait a
minute. You've set the example of labor-saving introductions; I'll
follow it. Here, girls, draw up in line, oldest first, and so on. Now,
this, Mr.--let's see, oh, yes! Mr. Ralph Gordon----" Bob pretended to
be near-sighted, and to consult Ralph's card at short range. "This,
Mr. Ralph Gordon, is my oldest and elder sister, Margery, christened
Margaret. This is Keren-happuch, next younger than I. This is Laura,
musical at twelve. This is pretty Polly, Polly-put-the-kettle on, my
sensible, reliable sister of nine. Penny, you can't see because she is
in bed. She's the baby, and we consider her a bright Penny, a fairly
new one, for she's only four years old, and we wouldn't give her for
a five dollar gold piece, as some people do bright new pennies. I am
Robert, 'Robert toi qui j'aime'--you know the air? I have only to
mention that the last named Scollard is the flower of the family, and
my duty's done."

"Fully," commented Margery, with her gentle smile. "We would not say
that he is not _a_ flower, but _the_ flower--well, that's another
matter."

"Yes," said Ralph with a little look at Margery that held the value of
a compliment.

"Quite another matter. He's not a violet, anyway, because that's a
modest flower. But what did he call you?" he added turning to Happie.

Happie laughed. "Did you ever hear such a name?" she cried.
"Keren-happuch. But they mercifully call me Happie. I was named after
an old lady, a friend of mother's mother, and she was named after her
grandmother. I think they might as well have stopped with her, and not
gone on handing down such a fearful name!"

"Well, it is rather a heavy weight," admitted Ralph. "But Happie is
enough to make up for it. I suppose it's a case of 'What's the odds as
long as you're Happie.' It ought to be a kind of fairy godmother for
whom you're named! Sounds like an old lady who was the only one of her
pattern, and who showered gifts on mere mortals."

"Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury is the only one of her pattern; you're
right there," Bob answered for Happie. "But she's not a fairy
godmother. She's as eccentric as she can be, most interesting, and as
independent as the Thirteen Colonies on July, 1776; rather mannish in
her ways, but very thoroughly a gentlewoman. However, she's not rich,
or we suppose she's not, so she can't play fairy godmother very well."

"And we need fairy godmothers," added Happie. "Our dear father didn't
know how to get rich, and when he died, four years ago, poor little
mother had to take his place. She's such a frail, delicate little
Charlotte-mother! It's not easy. We are all pining for the day when she
won't have to work for us, but we can work for her. How she goes down
in town every morning to an office. We keep house alone. Bob is in a
real estate office in the forenoon, but mother insists on his staying
at home to study in the afternoon; she is such a learned darling that
she gives us all a good education by teaching us at night, though she
is tired to death. Isn't she blessed? That's all of us; our history."

Ralph Gordon's humorous face grew grave, and a look of admiration and
respect dawned in his laughing eyes. "It's great," he said in boyish
commendation of true heroism. "I have a good mother, too," he added.
"My father died when Snigs--that's my brother; he's thirteen, and I
guess his name's Charley, but of course Snigs is much better--well,
when Snigs was three years old and I was five, father died. Mother
didn't have much either. She has kept us at school, and managed pretty
well--you see she came of good old fighting, revolutionary stock, and
she never dipped her colors once, though she had enough to discourage
her. She means me to go to college--she has gone without everything
she could give up to save enough to start me, and for the rest I am to
help myself through. She has moved up here thinking she could rent a
room or so in this flat to some of the boys up there at Columbia, and
so get on better until I start, which can't be for two years more. I
guess my mother is stronger, more able to bear her burdens than yours
is, from what you say, but I've got my hat off to my mother, too, every
time. Talk about women's rights! They're about as near right as they
can be, rights or not, and when there's anything to be done they don't
fall far behind men in pluck and stick-to-it-iveness, I notice."

"Hear, hear!" cried Margery and Happie. "We're much obliged."

"Don't mention it," said Ralph generously. "I hope you will live up to
my high opinion."

"I wonder if your cat--Whoop-la, isn't it?--got into both pans of
fudge, Happie?" suggested Margery.

"Sure enough!" cried Happie departing on this hint, as Ralph exclaimed:
"Thank goodness, you are beginning to prove yourself worthy of my
confidence in your sex!"

Happie returned with a pan of fudge, which she examined carefully
under the gaslight, turning it at different angles to make sure that
Whoop-la's paws had not touched it.

"I think it's all right," she announced at last. "It would surely show
if he had stepped into it."

"Certainly," assented Ralph promptly. "And departing leave behind him,
footprints in the bands of line. I see you've marked it off into
squares. But if he had stepped on it, N'importe! as we said when I was
Minister to Paris. Whoop-la is the cleanest cat on Manhattan Island. He
licks each snowy paw till it's free from fleck or flaw."

"Ugh!" shuddered Laura. "How disgusting! Think of eating candy he'd
touched with licked paws!"

"Oh, he didn't, Laura!" cried Margery. "He got into one pan, but he
missed the other."

"I believe you like nonsense as well as a Scollard--better than Laura
and Polly, who worry because it doesn't seem quite sensible," said
Happie approving the new boy more and more.

He shook his head reproachfully at Laura and Polly. "Do you not know
the full title of this highest form of philosophy, my sisters?" he
asked. "It is called: _Non sensus sed_, defense--us. That means it
is not sense but a defense, because it defends us from the horrible
fate of being dull. This has been contracted into one English
word--nonsense. But the whole title fits better."

Laura stared doubtfully at the lecturer, and Polly gazed at him with
round-eyed admiration, while Margery, Bob and Happie chuckled over his
fooling, beginning to suspect that this merry-looking boy with the
queer ways was decidedly clever.

"Pretty good fudge, Sister Keren-happuch; just a suspicion too sugary,
but I can use it," said Bob, helping himself to a corner piece,
and devouring it with the same relish he had shown for its three
predecessors.

"Same here!" remarked Ralph, following Bob's example. "It will go."

"So it seems," laughed Happie. "Much obliged."

"And I must do in like manner," Ralph supplemented his preceding
remark, rising. "I am tired with the effort of superintending the van
men and moving things around after they had gone. I felt tired enough
to dread the evening all alone in the lunatic asylum our place looks
like to-night. So I'm no end grateful to you for taking me off my own
hands. Hope you'll all come to see me. Next time maybe we'll get at
music--I play the violin and the mandolin a little, and I see some one
fiddles and pianos here."

"Bob plays the violin, but Laura is our musical girl; we all sing more
or less, and better or worse," said Happie. "Please come again. I'm
sorry you couldn't see mother for she is--well, you will see her by and
by."

She held out her honorably burnt little right hand, which had been
scalded that night by the gravy, and Ralph took it with a look of
hearty liking and respect.

"You're all my sort," he said. "I'm mighty glad we're neighbors.
You'll like my mother, too, though I say it who should, for I know her
better than any one else ever can."

Margery laughed, and shook hands so cordially that Bob and Happie knew
that Ralph had accomplished the difficult feat of winning reserved
Margery's approval in his first visit.

"We've had cat escapes, fudge escapes, loneliness escapes, formality
escapes, all turning on Whoop-la on your fire escape," said Ralph. "We
ought to sing, 'For We Are Jolly Good Fellows,' in parting, but I'm
afraid we should disturb your mother and wake up your Penny. Good-bye,
and heaps of thanks."

"Hold on; I'll get my top coat and glasses, and take you home in my
automobile," said Bob, opening the door, and shaking hands with his new
friend across the narrow hall as Ralph fitted his key into the door
opposite. "You won't wait? Good-night, then, and drop over as often as
you can, unceremoniously, like your intelligent Whoop-la."

"He's all right," he added to the girls as he closed the door of
Patty-Pans.




                              CHAPTER III

                       KEREN-HAPPUCH, THE FIRST


"NOT any more coffee, dear," Mrs. Scollard said, pushing back her chair
from the breakfast table.

"You have hardly eaten a thing, motherkins," protested Happie in a
worried voice.

"One cannot always be a credit to one's family cook, Hapsie," returned
her mother. "My appetite has been mislaid somewhere between here and
the city hall, in the subway, I fancy."

"I think it must have gone over to the Gordons' flat, blown the wrong
whistle, the way the grocers do," said Happie. "You never in all your
life saw any one so hungry as those two boys were last night when we
came home from the park."

"You had a good time, didn't you, dear?" Mrs. Scollard smiled at her
second daughter, who was smiling over her recollection of the previous
afternoon when she and Margery and Laura had been to the Metropolitan
Museum with Bob and the two Gordon boys, and to tea afterwards in the
Gordon flat, and had laughed every three minutes of the six hours.

"What are you going to do to-day, my house-keepers?"

"Scour our pans, our Patty-Pans," said Happie promptly, before Margery
could speak.

"My dear, this little flat will be washed away!" protested her mother,
submitting her glove to Polly for buttoning.

"Mother, it truly does need cleaning," said Margery. "You don't see it
in real daylight, except on Sunday, but we know! What's the matter?"

Her mother had caught the back of a chair and swayed slightly forward,
but stood erect and smiling in an instant, though her face was a shade
paler than usual.

"Nothing, dearies; don't look so frightened! There is a shadow that
comes over my eyes of late, and for a second I am wiped out of
existence, but you see how quickly I come back! Indigestion, probably;
it really is nothing."

"How can you have indigestion when you don't eat?" demanded Margery,
not at all reassured by her mother's explanation.

"And how could there be digestion when one ate nothing?" retorted
her mother. "Now, Margery, don't look like my worried little
seventeen-years-old grandmother! I am not ill. Bob! Come, Bob! I am
ready for my escort."

Bob appeared struggling with the over-starched buttonhole in his
collar, through which his button refused to pass, and with his tie
dangling in one hand.

"Oh, say, Margery, come on, like a good sister!" he implored. And
Margery "came on," rightly interpreting this as an appeal for aid.

Her soft fingers deftly coaxed the stiff linen over the stud, and tied
the four-in-hand into the perfection of knots. Bob picked up his hat,
got into the coat which Margery held for him, and offered his mother
his arm to escort her as far as the subway station, according to his
daily custom, with as fine an air as if the narrowness of the exit did
not necessitate her immediately dropping the arm as soon as it was
accepted.

Together this mother and son started out every morning, and the
pressure of his mother's hand in parting, and the blessing in her sweet
eyes as she went bravely away to labor for him and his sisters would
have kept Bob safe through whatever temptations might assail him during
the day, just as her honest boy's tight hand squeeze sustained the
mother through her weary hours.

"We mustn't think about it, Margery," said Happie visibly giving
herself a mental shake, as if she were a dog shaking off troubled
waters, and answering the unspoken anxiety in her sister's eyes. "We've
got to do our part anyway. And it can't be bad--it would be so very
bad, so dreadful, if it were bad that it can't be bad at all."

Margery shook her head, and turned away to hide the gathering tears.

"Don't shake your head," protested Happie impatiently. "I can't bear to
have people shake their heads! It's worse than saying the most awful
thing! Of course she isn't ill, nor going to be! Do you suppose we
could live if motherkins were ill? Well, then! That proves she isn't
going to be, because it stands to reason we've got to live. Now, let's
hurry these dishes away, and clean those rooms, and make motherkins'
room particularly spick-and-span, and then we shall feel better."

"You're a comfort, Happie!" said Margery warmly, laying her face for
an instant on the girl's bright hair. "No wonder mother says you are
Happie, our happiness! You are a perfect tonic. You would be the very
one to lead a forlorn hope."

"I'd rather lead a hope that wasn't forlorn," laughed Happie, well
satisfied with the result of her effort at cheering Margery. "Just a
plain, every-day hopeful hope. Come on, Margery! Polly and Penny, it's
dusting time, but you needn't dust, because we're going to sweep, and
sweeping one room in a little flat means dust in all. Perhaps Polly can
help Laura make beds and get things ready for sweeping."

This busy household of children had each her appointed tasks and even
baby Penelope was supposed to be useful.

"I've got to finish a waltz I was composing; I can't do anything till
that's done," said Laura. It was not a little trying to find Laura's
genius in the way of her fair share of commonplace tasks, but Margery
and Happie were used to it, and when Laura would not, why, Laura would
not, and there was less than no use in trying to make her see justice.

"I'll sweep one room, while you dust it, and you can sweep the next
one, and I'll dust it; that's fair," said Margery watching Laura depart
piano-ward with her troubled look of elder-sisterly responsibility,
wishing that she could coax Laura into playing fair.

"And begin in mother's," added Happie, tying up her head so tight that
her eyebrows mounted a quarter of an inch, the left higher than the
right.

Margery's broom flew, and Happie dusted briskly the chairs set out in
the parlor; it was something like the old-fashioned game of solitaire
with marbles to clean in the Patty-Pan; one had to move pieces about
many times before they could be restored to their appointed place.
Dorée considered cleaning done solely for his entertainment, and flew
after Happie's duster till she and Polly and Penny were in a gale of a
frolic with him, and Margery had to come out to hug the little cat, who
looked like a dandelion in a high wind, as he raced over the floor.

The two active housewives worked their way into the third little
bedroom rapidly, leaving the first two of the Patty-Pan chambers
guiltless of dust. Laura tired of her waltz at last, and consented to
go out to do the errands for the day, taking pains with her toilet,
though her calls were to be limited to the grocer, the butcher and
the German delicatessen shop, to fill out Margery's neat list of
necessities.

"Wonder where Penny is!" Polly called to the older girls after Laura
had been gone ten minutes, and the silence of the Patty-Pans had been
broken only by the lively broom and duster.

"Laura didn't take her," Margery called back. "I saw her start alone.
She's in there, isn't she?"

"Not one bit," cried Polly, as if her little sister were made up of
fragments.

"Why, how queer!" Happie said, emerging from Bob's room with dangling
duster. "She couldn't have gone out."

"No; here's her hat," Polly began, but a little crow of a laugh
interrupted her.

Looking up, Happie and Polly saw Penny's dusty head appearing over the
edge of the wardrobe in her mother's room, Jeunesse Dorée beside it.

The step-ladder leaned against the wardrobe, explaining the ascent.

"Oh, Penny, what made you go up there in all that dust? We couldn't
sweep it off to-day and I know it's dusty up there," said Margery.
"Come down, dear."

"Dorée ranned up," said Penny, whose verbs were subject to
eccentricities in their past tense. "I wanted to be up too, so I
climbed. But I can't come down, not ever. You'll have to come up after
me."

"I don't believe she can," sighed Happie. The space between the top of
the wardrobe and the ceiling was so small that the child could not sit
up, and it would have been impossible for her to slide down to the top
step of the ladder without falling.

"I'll go up, Margery; let me go," said Happie, and mounted the
step-ladder.

There was a loud report, the support broke on one side of the ladder,
and down came poor Happie, "ladder and all," like Rock-a-bye Baby.

"Oh, Hapsie, dearest, are you hurt?" cried Margery, flying to her
rescue.

"Well, I am--surprised," replied Happie, slowly rising. "I don't think
I'm hurt beyond a few scratches, and my feelings."

"Now, how'll we get the baby down?" asked practical Polly, satisfied
that Happie was not harmed seriously, and at once turning to something
that needed doing.

"We'll have to borrow a step-ladder from the Gordons," said Margery.
"I'll go, though I am not fit to be seen! Do I look a perfect pig?"

"You couldn't look like a pig, Peggy; you were made so you'd look
clean if you were covered with muddy stove blacking," said Happie. And
Margery departed on her errand.

She came back with both Ralph and "Snigs" Gordon, and their
step-ladder. Snigs chuckled at the sight of Penny's smutty little face
on which the tears which she had shed at Happie's downfall had made an
effective paste. Ralph placed his step-ladder and climbed up to rescue
the damsel in distress and the yellow kitten.

Just then the bell rang, a sharp, decided peal and Polly ran to press
the button in the kitchen which unfastened the outer door to admit
visitors.

"Now, who could that be?" cried Margery, dismayed.

"It could be a postman, a peddler, a life insurance agent, a bill, a
friend, a foe, the landlord, company, country cousins--shall I go on?"
said Snigs.

"Never mind," said Happie. "We never have company in daytime, because
all the girls we know are in school, and mother's friends understand
that they can't find her here except at night. Mercy, there are all the
things from Bob's room in the hall! Nobody can get in."

"Margery and we came in--and the step-ladder. You shouldn't expect, nor
admit, any bigger company in this little flat, Happie. Here is Penny;
please take her--eke the kitten. I'll stay up here aloft till you find
out what's coming up-stairs, and whether there's room for me and your
guest both." And Ralph handed down Penny to Margery, and seated himself
on the top step of the ladder, folding his arms with a perfectly
idiotic expression on his face.

The girls could not help laughing, and then the bell at their upper
door rang smartly, and Margery squeezed through the narrow passage to
answer the summons.

[Illustration: "'HOW DO YOU DO, MARGERY?'"]

"How do you do, Margery?" said a voice, strong, insistent, crisp, but
decidedly well-bred. "I have come to spend the night. There is room;
there's a couch in the dining-room."

"My goodness me! It's Keren-happuch, the first," whispered Happie in
comical dismay. "She's as nice as she can be, but I don't know how to
take her--I believe I'm afraid of her. She pays lots of attention to
me, too, because I'm her namesake."

"Had I better come down?" Ralph whispered back. "Or shall Snigs come
up?"

Before Happie could answer this important question, Margery and her
guest came down the hall; the boys and Happie heard Miss Bradbury set a
chair on another to make more space for their passage.

"Happie, I have come to make a short visit," announced that vigorous
lady entering the little bedroom. "What in the world are you doing
with two boys here when you're sweeping? And why do you keep one on a
step-ladder?"

"We don't, Aunt Keren," said Happie presenting her flushed cheek for
Miss Bradbury's kiss, which was more hearty than the girl realized.
"Penny had climbed on top of the wardrobe, and our step-ladder broke
when I tried to get her down. So Ralph brought his over and rescued
her. This is Charles Gordon, Miss Bradbury, and that up there is Ralph,
his brother; they are the boys in the next flat."

"Yes. I hope then that they are more quiet than most boys," remarked
Miss Bradbury. "I shall put my bonnet here, and my coat over the back
of that chair. It is not so cold. I wore my medium weight coat; there
are signs of spring--time for it, middle of March!" She spoke in crisp,
curt sentences as if not to waste a word. The boys looked at her, and
wondered that Happie had said she half feared her. They saw a tall
woman, perhaps two or three years past sixty. Her eyes were keen, but
humorous, her ample mouth was decidedly firm, but not unamiable. Her
nose was the nose of an aristocrat, and her garments, though remote
from so much as an approach to fashion, were of the best materials,
worn with a carelessness that betokened them interesting only for their
usefulness to the wearer. Eccentric Miss Bradbury was stern, perhaps,
but kind, and rather a fine lady in her queer way.

"Do you know why I came?" asked the visitor turning from the bed where
she had laid her bonnet, and giving two rapid strokes to her hair
without a glance at the mirror.

"Because you wanted to see us, we hope?" suggested Margery with her
gentle smile.

"Obviously. Never make smooth, meaningless speeches, Margaret," said
Miss Bradbury. "I came, however, rather more because I felt that you
wanted to see me. When I feel a drawing to certain people, as if I
were being called to them across the space dividing us, I know those
people need me. It has happened to me at various times in my life,
and never has led me wrong. Last night I felt that I was called here;
here I am. That may sound to you young people like great nonsense, but
Keren-happuch Bradbury is not given to nonsense, and she is convinced
that she is right in this matter."

"I don't see why not, since we know that there is such a thing as
wireless telegraphy," observed Ralph from his perch, whence he had been
too much interested to remember to descend.

"That's a very sensible remark, my boy, though you look anything but
sensible roosting on that step-ladder in that anthropological manner,"
said Miss Bradbury with a twinkle.

"You don't mean that we are going to need you for--well, that there is
any trouble coming, Aunt Keren?" said Happie, her mind reverting to her
mother's tired face.

"I am not prophesying; I am visiting, Happie," retorted Miss Bradbury.
"I have no idea why I am here, but here I am, and that because I felt
sure that you needed me. Better let me get luncheon, and send these
boys home while you finish your work, children. If you came to rescue
Penelope from the top of the wardrobe, there is no reason why you
should wait for her to crawl up again, Master Ralph Gordon."

Ralph unwound himself and began to come down on this strong hint, but
he was not offended; on the contrary he liked this queer person who
would guard his young girl neighbors like a dragon, as he plainly saw.

As Ralph stood erect and folded his step-ladder the bell rang once
more, this time with a startling peal, and, as Margery ran to the
speaking-tube and to press the button in the kitchen, Laura's voice was
heard screaming in the outer hall: "Oh, open the door, open the door
quick!" and she rattled the knob frantically.

"What is it, what has happened?" cried Happie, catching the little girl
as she half fell over the threshold when she opened the door.

"Mama, oh, poor, poor mama!" wailed Laura, clutching at Happie.

"What?" gasped Happie, turning so white that Ralph sprang to help her.

"She has been sent home in a carriage. Oh, oh, I came along just in
time to see her. I ran up when the man rang the bell," moaned Laura.

Miss Bradbury came forward with a kind of collected haste. "Laura," she
said sternly, "stop your hysterics. I have no patience with hysterics.
As though there were anything dreadful about being sent home in a
carriage! Ralph, come with me. We will go down and help Mrs. Scollard
up-stairs."

Ralph Gordon brushed past the frightened Scollard girls, and followed
Miss Bradbury instantly. When they returned it was very slowly, and
the janitor of the house, with a stranger who had been passing, was
helping them. They were carrying Mrs. Scollard, and Margery and Happie
clutched each other, and Laura ran away to hide, fearing to look.

Their mother's face was ashen, and her eyes were closed. Polly began
to cry, and Penny fled to Snigs for comfort; for the first time in her
life her sisters were not equal to giving it.

"This way," said Miss Bradbury leading. The men laid Mrs. Scollard on
her own bed, and withdrew.

Her eyes fluttered and opened. "Don't be frightened, children," she
said. "I'm only tired."

"What doctor shall I fetch?" asked Ralph. "And isn't there something
Snigs could get from the drug store in the meantime?"

"Yes. Go for--who, Margery?" asked Miss Bradbury.

"Doctor Revel on the corner is the nearest," said Margery, so
frightened her lips would hardly form the words.

"Happie, heat milk," ordered Miss Bradbury. "Yes, go for that doctor,
boy; hasten. I suppose we must not prescribe, but I think it's pure
exhaustion."

"Mother put away some of that old wine which you sent her for
Christmas, Aunt Keren. She said it must be kept for sickness. Isn't
that best now?" asked Happie.

"Old port! The very thing! Get it. I'm glad to see you have
self-control, Happie," her godmother smiled at her approvingly as she
spoke. "I am going to make Laura behave herself and look after Polly
and Penny. Then we will undress your mother and make her comfortable."

She stalked grimly away with a look that promised scant allowance for
Laura's twelve years. Miss Bradbury was the sort of woman that expected
every child, as well as "every man to do his duty," thus outstripping
England as interpreted by Nelson.

By some means she succeeded in dominating Laura, and the two younger
children's voices hushed, as Laura took them in hand.

Then this efficient woman who had come so opportunely to the frightened
tenants of the Patty-Pans, returned to get Mrs. Scollard comfortably in
bed, where she lay with closed eyes when Ralph returned with the doctor.

"You've been a good and useful boy; I thoroughly approve of you," said
Miss Bradbury, and somehow Ralph felt as if he had been brevetted. Miss
Keren-happuch was such a strong character that her commendation carried
with it the conviction of a genuine gain.

The Gordon boys slipped away to their own apartment across the hall.
Margery and Happie waited anxiously, holding each other fast, while the
doctor examined his patient.

"No disease; pure exhaustion, but that is quite enough," he said,
coming out through the sliding door to the waiting girls. "She has been
spurring herself on for months; the worn nerves can go no further. She
must have complete rest and good nursing for a year, perhaps; certainly
for a long time. Then I can promise that she will be perfectly
restored. It is nothing serious, nothing to be alarmed about, I assure
you."

The doctor bowed himself out, and Miss Bradbury attended him to the
door.

Margery and Happie stood silently watching him go, each occupied with
the same thought. Nothing serious? When the promise that their mother
should be restored _if_ she took the needed rest held the implication
that she would never be well without it! And when there was no money
but what she had earned, earned at the price of this breakdown!
Nothing serious! Why, nothing could be more serious, as this beloved
mother's young daughters realized with the hand of this, their first
acquaintance with real sorrow, heavily gripping their hearts.




                              CHAPTER IV

                         AN ANGEL IN DISGUISE


"IT'S rather worse to be ill with nothing the matter than to be
sensibly ill of a disease," said poor Mrs. Scollard speaking feebly,
but with an attempt at her own cheerfulness.

She had been ill for three weeks, and had not improved perceptibly
over her condition in the beginning. "Only a nervous collapse," the
doctor repeated. It had been so long coming on that the recovery must
be proportionately long. And how could she get better with the thought
that when her strength had given out, the family income had ceased
sitting like a vulture at her bedside? Small as was the rent of the
"Patty-Pans," still it must be paid. A month was as long as she could
be idle, yet that month was nearly past, and she was no better.

Margery, Bob and Happie for the first time realized what a vitally real
thing money is, and vainly strove to find a way to take their mother's
place as the bread-winners. They understood only too clearly that there
was no chance for that dear mother to get well while she lay in the
second Patty-Pan room with anxiety tearing at her heart-strings.

Ralph and Snigs and their fine mother were comforts in those black
days, but it was on Miss Bradbury that the Scollards found themselves
relying with hourly increasing appreciation of her strength. That
remarkable woman had not suggested returning to her home, but nightly
occupied the parlor couch in the Patty-Pans, and daily took charge of
its sorrowful tenants. Delicacies such as Margery would not have dared
to buy found their way to Mrs. Scollard, and Margery discovered when
she went to market that there were no out-standing accounts such as she
had been dreading with the neighboring tradesmen; Miss Keren-happuch
paid as she went out of her own purse, which the Scollard girls had
always believed to be not over-abounding.

"Over-doing in work is not likely to lead to under-doing a breakdown,"
Miss Bradbury replied to Mrs. Scollard's remark. "Nature is an
excellent accountant, and knows how to collect her dues. I think I
should be satisfied with what ails you, if I were you, Charlotte."

She altered the position of Mrs. Scollard's pillows and smoothed
them with a touch singularly gentle in such an energetic person, and
beckoned Margery to follow her into the dining-room. Laura sat here
in an attitude of despair, her feet stuck straight out before her
indifferently to the size of the room, her arms hanging over the back
of her chair. Bob and Happie were trying to occupy themselves with the
lessons which their mother would have required had she been well,
and serene little Polly sat rocking her doll, she the more sleepy
of the two, though the doll's eyes did droop with the motion of the
rocking-chair.

Miss Bradbury took the chair which Polly had occupied when the little
girl yielded it up on her entrance, and gathered Polly into her lap,
who in turn still held Phyllis Lovelocks tight.

"Now, my dears," began Miss Keren-happuch in her businesslike way that
covered so much tenderness, "you all look dreadfully worried. You must
not; your mother will get well after she gets to the country."

"Why, Aunt Keren!" exclaimed Happie reproachfully. "When you know she
can't even afford to stay in the city!"

"Which is the reason that she is going to my farm, that, and the fact
that she must have fresh air and quiet," said Miss Keren-happuch.

"Your farm!" exclaimed all the children together.

"Yes; in Pennsylvania," said Miss Bradbury calmly. "I have never seen
it, and I doubt strongly that I shall be particularly pleased with the
sight. But a farm it is, of some seventy acres, up in the mountains,
and there is where we are going in two weeks."

"We don't understand," cried Bob, after he had exchanged excited and
bewildered glances with the others.

"There is nothing more to understand," declared Miss Bradbury. "Polly,
your doll's arm will break off if you don't turn it around. Your
mother must rest, there is no money to provide that rest, I must go to
the country somewhere, so instead of boarding this summer, I am going
to open that house of mine, which I have never seen, and you children
are going to keep house for your mother and me indefinitely. It's not
in the least difficult nor mysterious."

"You trump!" cried Bob with an enthusiasm that prevented any suspicion
of disrespect.

"I heard a boy say lately that he would not live in the country for
anything," observed Miss Bradbury with her twinkle.

"But to save his mother, and when he didn't know how he could live
anywhere!" cried Bob.

"You dear, dear, blessed Aunt Keren!" cried Happie, throwing herself
upon her adopted relative with an abandon which, under ordinary
circumstances that lady would have disapproved.

"There, there! I suppose it is a relief," she said patting Happie's
back. "But I warn you that it will not be at all attractive, probably.
I took it for a debt, and my debtor said afterwards, so I am told, that
it was cheaper to give it to me than to keep it. I suspect that he
pretended not to be able to pay me in money in order to get rid of this
farm. So you may be prepared for going into the wilderness. However, it
will be a wilderness of pure air and great altitude, and we can exist
somehow. It will undoubtedly build up poor Charlotte."

"I am going to like it," Happie declared. "I learned to like tomatoes,
and I thought that in all this world I could never taste them a second
time. And I love olives now, but when I first tried one, I really had
to rush away from the table. So I am going to love that farm no matter
what it is. How could we help loving a place that cured motherkins?"

"Aunt Keren, you are an angel in disguise," announced Laura solemnly.

"I must admit the disguise," retorted Miss Bradbury. "Now, children, I
want you to get ready to go out of town in two weeks from now. Can you
do it?"

"Yes, but we have a lease of the Patty-Pans; we shall have to sub-let
it," said Margery, with the tiny anxious line appearing in her forehead.

"Furnished," supplemented Miss Bradbury. "I shall send up all the
furniture necessary. There is some furniture there; I don't know how
much, nor how good."

"Nobody has told you what we think of your giving up your comfortable
summer in the White Mountains and down in Maine, without a care, and
going up to this farm in order to cure dear mother, and to help us,"
said Margery, with a quiver in her voice.

"Nonsense!" cried Miss Keren-happuch briskly. "Every landed proprietor
should look after his estate. It is high time that I saw mine. I shall
enjoy the novelty of the situation. For the rest, Margaret, I have a
very real affection for your mother, and a profound respect for the way
that she has fought her good fight for you orphaned children. There
is more than you know in my feeling for Charlotte; your grandmother
and I were not ordinary friends. I should not do less than my best for
her daughter, even if I were not as fond of her as I am. So there is
nothing more to be said on that head."

"We will call the farm 'the Ark,'" said Happie. "It will be our refuge
in this flood of affliction."

"It's not a particularly original name, Hapsie," remarked Bob. "I think
lots of houses have been called the Ark, but it fits this case to a T.
I don't suppose there's any doubt that we should not have had a place
in which to lay our heads if it had not been for Aunt Keren and her
farm."

A knocking at the dumb waiter door warned the Scollards that Ralph
and Snigs wanted to be admitted; they had adopted this substitute for
the bell not to disturb Mrs. Scollard. Polly slipped down from Miss
Bradbury's lap and ran to open the door to them.

"Boys, what do you think?" cried Happie the moment they entered. "We
are going away!"

The Gordons had known all the troubles, the anxieties that threatened
to engulf their neighbors, and had shared their despondency over a
prospect that held no hope. They stopped short, looking hardly less
excited than the family group.

"What do you mean?" Ralph cried.

"Going away with blessed Aunt Keren to a farm she owns in
Pennsylvania," Happie said. "It will save mother's life--and you
know what else it will do, Ralph. We are going to try to sub-let the
Patty-Pans furnished, so it won't be good-bye forever to you."

"And my mother wants to find another flat!" cried Snigs, getting very
red in the effort to speak fast enough. "There are some college boys
from the South want to stay in New York all summer. She wants to rent
another flat and take them with her. She was saying to-night she might
move if she could not get one in this house. Mayn't we have yours?"

"Now, did you ever in all your life?" demanded Happie of the world at
large. And the world at large, in the person of Margery, Bob and Laura,
replied that it never did! Even Miss Bradbury seemed elated over this
remarkable coincidence of need and supply on both sides.

"Come on over and tell mother about it!" said Snigs, seizing Bob's arm,
and gesticulating wildly to Margery and Happie, while plunging towards
the door as if he feared the escape of the Patty-Pans or of his mother,
unless they were at once permanently secured to each other.

"Go, if you like," Miss Bradbury supplemented. "I think I will unfold
my plan to your mother this moment. The rule is not to talk to a
nervous invalid at night, but I suspect that she is more sleepless now
from worry than she will be from excitement over a prospect which,
though not brilliant, at least holds a solution of her troubles."

The oldest Scollards having departed with and to their neighbors, Miss
Keren-happuch went into their mother's room, and seated herself on the
edge of the bed with an air of such resolution that the sick woman
humorously wondered whether she had come to amputate or to execute.

"You are to be deported, Charlotte," she announced decidedly.

"Deported? Why and whence?" asked Mrs. Scollard.

"For precisely the same reason that the authorities always
deport--because you are not fit to stay," replied Miss Bradbury. "We
are going to spend the summer on my Pennsylvania farm, your family and
myself."

"I didn't know you had a farm," gasped Mrs. Scollard, catching at the
first thing that occurred to her to say, overwhelmed with the magnitude
of the announcement.

"Neither did I, fully, until to-day," said Miss Bradbury. "I have never
seen it, but I believe it will shelter us. As soon as you are able to
move we are going, and our return is most indefinite. You are going to
sub-let the Patty-Pans, furnished, and the girls are to keep house for
us while we enjoy ourselves without a care upon our minds."

"Dear, dear Miss Keren!" sobbed Mrs. Scollard with the ready tears of
nervous prostration. "How good you are! But do you think I could let
you take my place, and support all my family for several months?"

"Nonsense, Charlotte! I shall save money. My summers cost me not less
than three hundred dollars always, junketing around from hotel to
hotel, from the seashore to the mountains. We won't spend three hundred
dollars up there, not all of us put together, if I know anything about
an isolated farm. And I really ought to look after my property. What
do I get out of the sort of summers I usually spend? Weariness and
vexation of spirit! Dress three times a day, not a solitary spot that
isn't humming with summer voices! When I want to sit down and hear
the waves, or to read, I have to hear a lot of empty-headed women
telling one another about their servants' misdeeds, or how the tailor
spoiled a coat, or--worst of all--how seriously they doubt the wisdom
of speaking to some of the other women, one of whom is too quiet to
be a desirable acquaintance, and the other too gay to know! And all
the long golden summer days they sit on the piazza and make hideous,
useless things out of pretty materials! It is nothing to regret that I
may spend one summer on my own probably worthless estate, in dignified
seclusion. Whether or not, we are going. I did not come to consult you,
but to announce it. So go to sleep. For half a year you are to have a
vacation where, at the worst, you will be two thousand feet above tide
water, and must get strong, knowing the children are safe, and you are
secure, breathing good air, even if there is little else to live on.
Go to sleep, Charlotte, and stop worrying, because I want you to get
strong enough to go at once. Since I have remembered my farm, I am all
youthful impatience to see it."

Good Miss Keren-happuch arose with a jerk, intending to stalk out of
the room, but Mrs. Scollard sprang up and caught her around the neck.
"You dear, you dear! I can't thank you!" she sobbed.

"I don't remember suggesting that you should," said Miss Keren gruffly.
But the kiss with which she laid her old friend's daughter back upon
the pillow was very tender.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Gordon was delighted with the opportunity to take the Patty-Pans
and its furniture; it fitted her plans to obtain it quite as well as it
worked for the Scollards to have her assume it. Before any one had time
to realize what had happened, energetic Miss Bradbury had set Margery
and Happie at their preparations for departure, and going away had
become a definite fact.

It seemed a little formidable to the three eldest children, now that
the plan had taken on definiteness. Mrs. Scollard was about again,
proving that if one can find the way to minister to a mind diseased,
strength attends on such ministration, but she was still so weak and
pale that Margery could hardly look at her without tears. She tried
hard to be brave, but she dreaded leaving behind her the only life that
she had known, to go away into an untried life among new surroundings.

More than any of the other children, Happie had a cat-like love of
place, and to her it was very hard to go away from New York with
uncertainty in her mind as to how or when she could return to it.

"I suppose I shall go around wailing and gnashing my teeth, Bob," she
confided to her brother. But Bob knew her, and her ability to make the
best of something that was not merely a bad bargain, but no bargain at
all.

"Not you, Hapsie!" he said. "You will find a dozen good reasons for
preferring that farm to any other spot on earth, no matter if it turns
out as bad as Martin Chuzzlewit's Eden."

"That's not a bad testimony to the fitness of your nickname, Happie,"
smiled Margery.

Laura openly gave way to grief, which she carefully fostered in
herself, for Laura loved the rôle of martyr as well as Happie loved to
be sunny.

It troubled Mrs. Scollard sorely to see Laura's sorrow until she
took to singing Schubert's "Adieu," as a suitable expression of her
woe, then her mother smiled at the sentimental little girl, justly
concluding that sentimental grief was not dangerously deep.

Jeunesse Dorée was to accompany his family as a matter of course,
though the old colored woman who came to clean for them held up her
hands in horror at the suggestion.

"You sholy won't have luck if you takes him," she groaned. "'Twan't
never reckoned right where I come fum to move a cat, and I just begs
an' prays you let him run. It's bad nuff ter see you goin', let 'lone
wif a cat."

"We think it would be very bad luck to be deprived of Dorée," smiled
Mrs. Scollard. "And surely, Amanda, some sort of punishment ought to
fall on those who would turn a petted creature into the street to
starvation and ill-treatment! I think I'd rather risk the effect of
taking him."

"Bob has bought a beautiful strong basket for him," said Happie
applauding her mother's sentiments with a bright smile as she went
through the Patty-Pans parlor.

She found Laura with Polly in the chamber which they shared, Polly
watching her elder with a face expressive of puzzled awe, tempered by
amusement. Penny was lost in the labor of packing the animals into a
large Noah's ark, and losing her patience with the bulk of elephants
and flies--which really did not differ materially--and with unruly legs
and horns which got continually entangled.

"Bob says," the mite was remarking, "we's all going to live in a nark,
an' for me to get you nanimals all back 'gain 'fore ve flood. If you
don't swallow you' horns, you foolsish mooly cow, you, I'll make you
sail on ve roof, and vhen you'll see!"

"Leave the ducks and geese out to swim, Penny mine, and you'll have
more room," suggested Happie. "Let Happie coax the cow to draw in her
horns. There, you see what good it does to pat her and to speak to her
gently? She's in. What are you doing, Laura?"

Laura looked up, raised her eyebrows, and sighed with her grown-up air,
but she did not answer.

"She says she's going to put all her pretty things in a box and mark it
for me when I'm twelve, going on thirteen," said Polly answering for
her. "She says she's sure she'll never live to use 'em. Now, isn't that
silly? Because farms are healthy, I thought!"

Happie laughed. "Oh, Laura," she cried, "how can you be such a goose? I
wouldn't count on getting those treasures if I were you, Polly. I think
Laura may live to use them."

Laura regarded Happie with serene superiority. "Grief often kills," she
said with the brevity of a tragic poet. "I'm sure I shall pine away. Do
you know what nostalgia means?"

Again Happie laughed out merrily. "No; do you?" she said.

"It means homesickness," replied Laura with crushing dignity. "I found
the word in a book of poetry and I looked it up, because I knew it must
mean something lovely and sad. I made a song without words about it;
it goes this way." And Laura hummed a line of music that was more minor
than any known key seemed able to represent.

"Isn't that perfectly be-au-ti-ful?" she demanded. "Doesn't that sound
just like nostalgia? That may be my last composition; it will be if
this move kills me, as I 'most know it will. Wouldn't you feel sure
that meant some one dying of homesickness if you heard it, and no one
told you?"

"What a queer thing you are, Laura!" exclaimed Happie, half
impressed, though she could never keep a respectfully straight face
over Laura's performances. "I can't tell whether it sounds like
nos--what-you-call-it or not, because I never heard the word before, so
I haven't had time to know it set to music, but I don't think I should
know that tune meant homesickness. It sounds to me like the wail of the
washerwoman who got too much blueing in the clothes--it's the bluest
thing I ever heard."

"You haven't one bit of--of anything in you, Happie," said Laura
turning away pettishly.

Bob came in, his arms full of half-discarded boyish treasures. "Say,
what do you think, Hap; will there be room for this stuff?" he
demanded. "I could give it up, but I'd just as lief keep it. You see it
won't be our house."

"Still there must be room for everything, since it's a farm, and we
have a freight car to ourselves. I'd keep it," said Happie with the
understanding she could not give Laura.

"I guess I asked you instead of Margery because I wanted that advice,
and I knew you'd give it--she thinks I clutter," said Bob. "Are you
going to take all your own Lares and Penates?"

"What it is to have a classical education!" exclaimed Happie in mock
admiration. "No; we are only going to take our Laura and Penelope."
And she swooped down to snatch a refreshing kiss from the pink and
white baby, and to rescue a particularly spotted dog from having his
exceedingly curled-up tail shut in the cover of the Noah's ark.

       *       *       *       *       *

At last all the preparations were completed, the Patty-Pans flat was
shining and fleckless, everything in apple-pie order to be relinquished
to Mrs. Gordon's care. Ralph and Snigs were inconsolable over the
approaching parting until Miss Bradbury hinted her intention of asking
them to follow the exiles sometime during the summer, when they plucked
up heart and began to plan for meeting on the farm.

It was a cold, raw day in April, a day left over from March getting
used up in April, a most dreary and uncomfortable day on which to set
forth upon a journey with an invalid to migrate from the city to the
country, and to a house the comfort of which there was good reason to
doubt.

The Gordon boys went to the station and pressed upon their friends, in
parting, bulky packages of almost any possibilities. They shook hands
with emotion, and the Scollard party sank into its seats silently with
a suspicious redness about other lashes than Laura's, though everybody
made heroic efforts to appear cheerful, and not ungrateful for Miss
Bradbury's kindness. The only way to succeed in this effort was to keep
constantly in view the good that was to be done the dear mother.

The warmth of the train was welcome. Poor Mrs. Scollard sank into the
corner of her chair hardly able to endure the neuralgia which had added
itself to her weakness, glad of the friendly steam pipes.

The train pulled slowly out of the station, and steamed, with
increasing speed across the plains of Jersey towards the distant hills.

No one spoke for some time. Then Happie aroused herself. "I wonder if
the farm has good cherry-trees," she said.

Bob laughed. "Already, Happie?" he said. "I thought it would take
longer than this for even your barometer to indicate clearing."

Happie smiled a feeble smile. "I'm afraid I don't much care whether it
has or not," she said. "I just happened to think of it."

"Don't apologize," returned Bob. "It's a comfort to have you beginning
to sit up and take notice."

Jeunesse Dorée purred when one of the children peeped into his basket,
according to his cheerful habit of responding with a song to any notice.

After a time the landscape arose from the dull level of its beginnings
and began to put on beauty. The hills were showing their heads in the
distance, with blue vaporous lights playing over them in the pale
sunshine of the chill afternoon.

On they steamed, the grade perceptibly higher, until all the young
folk were looking out of the windows, enjoying the barren beauty of
the mountains in the early spring. Mrs. Scollard felt the benediction
of space and quiet, her throbbing nerves grew more still as her eyes
sought the horizon with the delight this beauty-loving woman always
found in nature.

Miss Bradbury sat preternaturally stiff and straight looking at the
scene, which was as new to her as to any of the others, with the
approval of a proprietor.

"It's pretty here!" cried Polly, as the train rounded a curve. As she
spoke the travelers felt its motion retard. It stopped, and the guard
called out: "Crestville!" They had arrived.




                               CHAPTER V

                           TAKING POSSESSION


CRESTVILLE had no public carriages, or "if it had," Happie said,
"it kept them very private." Miss Bradbury, and what Bob called
"her personally conducted party," walked around the platform of the
little red station, discovering nothing but an open wagon to which
were attached two sorry-looking horses with drooping heads and tails,
a wagon which could not possibly be construed as intended to carry
passengers.

A road ran past the station, crossing the track and continuing its
muddy way up the hill, losing itself under the bare trees. The mud was
disheartening, the silence oppressive. Mrs. Scollard, weak and tired,
caught her breath in an arrested sob, feeling that with the dying
echoes of the train had died away also the last echoes of civilization.

"Is there any one here who will take us to the Bittenbender farm?" Miss
Bradbury asked the station-master.

"That's owned by a city woman now," remarked that worthy reflectively.

"Yes, I own it. How shall I get there?" said Miss Bradbury.

"I heard she'd got some one here to open it up for her," said the
station-master.

"Yes; I wrote Mrs. Shafer to see that the place was aired and cleaned;
we've come up for the summer. Can you tell me how to get my friends
over there?" insisted Miss Bradbury, divided in mind between annoyance
and amusement.

"The widow Shafer's got rheumatism too bad to clean anything, her own
house even, leave alone yours," said the station-master. "She couldn't
open up."

"What did she do then? Why didn't she write me that she couldn't attend
to it?" demanded Miss Bradbury, aghast at the prospect of taking her
flock into a damp, chilly, uncleaned house.

"Left it go," replied the station-master to her first question.
"I guess she was talking of writing, but her hands hain't much
good--they're stiff."

"Well, you haven't told me who I can get to take us over," Miss
Bradbury reminded him, abandoning the subject of the widow.

"There hain't nobody," replied the station-master succinctly.

The owner of the wagon and the discouraged horses had come forth from
the freight end of the station at the beginning of this conversation to
which he had attended with rapt attention, his jaws slowly moving up
and down as he leaned forward, elbows on knees on the cart seat which
he had ascended.

"You couldn't come back after her, Jake?" suggested the station-master
turning to him.

The man shook his head. "Goin' after a load," he said, not specifying
of what. "Mebbe I could send Pete Kuntz back after her; his hosses
hain't haulin'."

"Pete couldn't take 'em all--two, four, eight of 'em," said the
station-master reflectively. "He couldn't come back after another load,
neither; 'twould make it too late. That's a bad road up along past
Eli's, before you come to the Bittenbender place. If I was you, livin'
up that way, I'd see if I couldn't git the road overseer to work that
road. I declare I'd ruther come down with my team and work it myself,
if I wuz you, even if 'twan't part of my reg'lar road tax, before I'd
ride it as 'tis."

"That overseer hain't worth nothin'," declared the driver. "I wisht
George Lieder had got it--I'd er voted fer him, I would, if they'd er
put him up."

"Don't you think there's any way that this Pete you spoke of could get
us over?" interrupted Miss Bradbury. "And wouldn't it be better to
decide on something soon? It grows dark early, and my friend is ill."

"Well, I guess!" said the man on the wagon. "There'd be nine of you
with Pete. Say, I never thought! Pete might go up an' git my three
seated hack wagon, an' take 'em all to oncet, usin' his team. Say,
wouldn't that fix it, Jimmy?"

"I guess," assented the station-master.

"And what about the trunks?" suggested Miss Bradbury, indicating the
generous pile that adorned the platform. "We must have some of them
to-night."

"Well, if you was to make it worth my while I'd do my haulin'
to-morrer, an' take them there trunks up fer you," said the driver.

"What do you ask?" inquired Miss Bradbury, inwardly resolved to meet
any demand.

"Guess I'd have to charge you a dollar and a-half," said the man,
eyeing Miss Bradbury dubiously out of the shadow of his very long nose.

Miss Bradbury gave a soft chuckle, though her face remained grave. She
glanced at the six trunks which had come with them and said: "That's a
bargain."

"Couldn't Bob and I ride over with him, Aunt Keren?" asked Happie.

"I'm afraid it would prove a springless and tiresome drive, Happie,"
said Miss Keren. "But I've no other objection, if your friend here has
none--Mr.--Mr.----"

"Shale, Jake Shale," supplemented the man. "I don't mind; I kinder like
comp'ny."

He loaded the trunks on his wagon, and Happie clambered up beside him,
while Bob adorned the top of the smallest trunk.

"I hope you will send this Pete after us soon," said Miss Bradbury as
she saw Mrs. Scollard press her fingers into her throbbing temples.

"Yes, ma'am; oh, my, yes, ma'am," responded Jake, gathering up the
reins. "He'll be along quick. I'll hustle an' so'll he. Say, Jimmy,
if you want any more of that there cider o' mine I've got a couple o'
barrels you kin have's well's not. I'd like you to git it in your own
kaigs, though."

"Well, if you could wait a little, I'd go up-stairs an' ask Hannah what
she thought," said Jimmy. "Mebbe you'd better git along now, though,"
he added, seeing Miss Bradbury's objection to further delay getting
ready to explode. "I'll let you know to-morrer night. It's lodge night,
anyhow, an' you'll be comin' down, won't you?"

"I guess," said Jake, and actually drove away.

To Happie's and Bob's surprise, in spite of his declaration of a mild
liking for companionship, Jake did not show any desire to enter into
conversation during the long up-hill drive of three miles. They stopped
on their way to start "Pete Kuntz" back after the rest of the exiles,
and to the children's relief, he seemed several degrees less slow and
indifferent than their driver, or than Jimmy at the station. There
really seemed ground for hoping, as they watched him get out his horses
and jump on one to go after Jake's "hack wagon," that their tired
relatives left behind might get to their new home before nightfall.

The road ran through woods, light growth chiefly, the second yield
after forest fires. Sometimes these scrub oaks, birch, maples and the
rest, fell away, allowing glimpses of views that made these two exiles
cry out with pleasure, and gave them a fleeting hope that there might
be balm in their Gilead. But the mud was thick, the wagon wheels sank
low, and the tired horses toiled till Happie and Bob, true animal
lovers, ached sympathetically.

It was a lonely road; they passed but one farm, and Happie's heart grew
heavier and heavier with forebodings that this new home was going to
tax severely her ability to live up to her nickname. The desolation,
the sense of being cut off from everything on the face of the earth
except mud and trees, the remembrance of her mother's weakness, was
bringing on a despair that the splendid views of distant hills and
valleys, caught through the openings in the trees, soon lost their
power to alleviate.

"Are there many tramps around here?" asked Bob suddenly, and Happie
knew that he shared her thoughts and feelings.

"Never none," said Jake promptly. "Too far from the railroad track."

"Isn't that comfortable, Hapsie?" said Bob looking with pity at his
courageous sister's pale face. "And did you ever see finer views? And
don't forget how tired and hungry you are, Happie! Remember things look
very different on a full stomach, and when you're rested."

Happie nodded hard, not trusting herself to speak, and Bob gave up
trying to point out the brighter side, invisible to himself, and
contented himself with patting her hand.

At last they began to climb a hill that was far higher and steeper
than any they had yet scaled, but on which, fortunately, the mud had
completely dried. The ascent was beautifully wooded, with real forest
growths, and bright wintergreen berries gleamed at the foot of the
trees.

As they neared the top, the woods fell away, and at the summit they
came out upon an open plain. On every side stretched a view that was
more sublime than any upon which Bob and Happie's young eyes had
ever rested. Happie forgot her weariness, hunger and despair as she
straightened herself to drink it in, and Bob gave vent to a long
whistle, exclaiming: "My soles and uppers!"

A little distance down the road they saw a dilapidated rail fence and
what had once been a gate. Jake pointed to it with his boney hand.
"That's Bittenbender's," he said. "That's your grandmother's place."

"The Ark, Hapsie, after such a long deluge!" exclaimed Bob. "But that's
not our grandmother, Mr. Shale; that's Miss Bradbury, whom nobody will
ever be lucky enough to have for a grandmother."

Happie had bubbled over into her infective laugh at the suggestion of
Miss Keren-happuch as a grandmother, and both young people strained
their eyes for the first glimpse of the house.

They got it in a moment, disclosing a brown house, sadly in need
of paint, two stories high and decidedly over-shadowed by a big,
ramshackle barn, gray from weather, with its front door swinging on
one hinge. This melancholy building was flanked by a chicken house and
granary in worse repair than itself.

"It has every foot of this glorious view!" cried Happie, seeing the
disgust on Bob's face, and sincerely able herself to rejoice in the
thought.

"Well, it needs it!" said Bob, and Happie could not deny that he spoke
truly.

Jake turned in at the gate; Bob ironically pointed out to Happie the
advantages of a gate that did not require opening.

Jake paused at the steps of the house. "I guess I'll let the trunks
here," he said. "We couldn't take 'em into the house till they come
with the keys anyhow."

Bob and Happie assented, and the trunks were deposited at the foot
of the steps, all three of which needed mending. But after Jake had
driven away, they found that the assumption that keys were needed to
enter this house was a mistake--the door was not fastened; it opened on
slight pressure, and Bob and Happie entered.

The unattractive odors of an old house long closed saluted them as
they came in, and they caught a glimpse of a scantily furnished
sitting-room and dining-room. The stairs ran up straight before them,
beginning just beyond the casements of the two doors; they were not
carpeted, but had once been painted a depressing drab, of which proof
remained on the sides around the bannisters, though the middle of each
step was worn quite bare.

Happie shrank with an irrepressible shudder; the whole aspect was so
barren, so repulsive to her homesick soul.

"Let's wait for the others to see it for the first time with us," she
said. "Let's sit outside on the steps till they come."

Bob smiled and drew her hand protectingly through his arm.

"You can wait to see more, you are not impatient for your new home, are
you, Happie? And you like the view outside better than inside? Well,
the house doesn't 'pretty much,' as old Mr. Frost used to say, but it
certainly has the greatest view in Pennsylvania."

They sat down disconsolately on the steps, in the dampness of the
declining day, and waited. The stillness was dreadful. Happie began to
laugh, tearfully, and Bob turned to her with an anxiously inquiring
look.

"No, I'm not getting crazy or hysterical," she replied to it. "I was
thinking of that funny story of Ardelia in Arcady, and that the poor
little street child was right when she said: 'Gee! N'Yawk's de place!'"

"Now, Happie!" exclaimed Bob reproachfully.

"I'm sorry, Bob," said Happie contritely. "I'll never so much as hint
it again."

In less time than they had expected, Bob and Happie saw the large
covered wagon, with its three wide seats "all filled with Scollards,"
Bob said, appearing at the top of the hill, and they ran down to the
rickety gate to give their family a welcome which should in some sort
make up for the inhospitality of their surroundings.

"Supper ready, Happie?" her mother called out cheerfully, seeing at a
glance the effort that her girl was making to be blithe, and seconding
it handsomely.

"Tsupper ready, Happie?" echoed Penelope sincerely.

"Not quite," Happie called back. "We waited to have you go through
the house with us; we thought Aunt Keren had a right to the first
inspection, so we couldn't get supper till you came."

"Where can we get supper?" asked Margery dismally.

"In our own kitchen," returned Miss Bradbury. "We have laid in quite
enough provisions, and I shall not mind burning up the gate if there is
no other fuel."

Bob marshaled the family up the three dilapidated steps, and threw open
the door.

"One at a time, if you please, gentlemen, as the parrot said when the
crows began pulling out his feathers," he remarked. "You have to go in
and turn at once to the right or to the left, because there's no room
in the hall to assemble. But it's all right, Aunt Keren; it will be
jolly after we have jollied it a little," he added hastily, remembering
the kindness that had brought them there, and fearing Miss Bradbury
might think him unappreciative.

"We are explorers together, Bob; I am but your pilot, so don't dread
my being hurt by your 'jollying,'" said Miss Bradbury. "I don't feel
responsible for this house. I am going up to lay off my bonnet; I
don't like to inaugurate our summer by putting my bonnet down on the
dining-room table." And Miss Bradbury rigidly stalked up the steep
stairs to begin her life in the country according to her ideas of
propriety.

Margery and Laura went into the living-room, while Mrs. Scollard with
her two least girls turned towards the dining-room.

Laura dropped on a chair, which promptly gave way under her, and she
fell on the floor in a heap that effectually prevented the remarks she
was about to make.

"Go light on our furniture, Laura," said Bob gravely. "It is marked:
Fragile."

"How was I to know that horrid chair's third leg was just stuck in?"
demanded Laura, with tears in her eyes; she hated of all things to be
made ridiculous.

"How indeed?" echoed Bob. "How were you to know which was its third
leg? I'm sure I couldn't tell."

"It's worse than I expected, Happie," said Laura indignantly, as if her
sister were responsible for the fact.

"I didn't expect such a magnificent view," said Happie staunchly. "Now,
if you're the poet you want to be you'll think of nothing but that one
thing."

"Aunt Keren said it would be slenderly furnished," said Margery, "but I
did not think any furnishing could be as slender as this is."

"This isn't slender furnishing--it's generous unfurnishing, Margery,"
said Happie. "Besides, what does it matter; Aunt Keren has sent up a
whole carload of things! Let's go see mother and the kitchen."

Mrs. Scollard turned to meet them with a smile that was heroic,
considering her shocked state of mind, and her neuralgia, and Miss
Bradbury came down stairs with an expression of resolution on her face
that would have befitted Jael, a likeness further carried out by Miss
Keren-happuch's first remark.

"I must find some nails before I sleep and fasten something over the
window in the room where I took off my bonnet; the glass is out," she
remarked. "Lassies, you and I are to get supper. There are few chairs,
and they are like Jenny Wren, their 'backs are bad and their legs are
queer.' Fortunately there can't be less than one of a table, or we
should have nothing to eat off of, and we have one table--genuine old
pine! Bob, suppose you try getting water, and then forage for wood; the
pump looks able-bodied, if you are."

Bob was successful in his interview with the pump, and returned
victorious from his forage for wood.

The stove was rusty, and "its draught was draughty," Happie remarked,
as she vainly coaxed it to give the wood the warm welcome they felt it
deserved.

At last a fire was dully burning, and the water in a saucepan,
appropriated in lieu of the leaking teakettle, had begun to bubble
around the edges, so that there was a cheering prospect of tea. Happie
vigorously beat eggs to be scrambled in the frying-pan which Miss
Bradbury was scouring, and Margery cut the bread which they had brought
with them, while Laura mournfully set the table with such odds and ends
of crockery, politely called china, which the place afforded.

When it was ready, it really was not a very bad supper, served with the
best of sauces, to all but Mrs. Scollard, who was far too worn-out to
do more than nibble a crust of bread with her tea.

No one had remembered kerosene oil, so the three glass lamps discovered
in the cellar were "_hors de combat_," Laura said, priding herself on
her French surviving her despair.

There was no choice but to go to bed early for lack of light by which
to sit up. Everybody's spirits were several notches higher for the
comfort of food, and Penny grew quite hilarious playing trolley on a
couch that had such bad springs that Bob remarked "there was no danger
of a live wire on that trolley."

Jeunesse Dorée contributed to the improved state of mind of the exiles
by his funny antics, going on a voyage of discovery over his new
quarters, backing and shying and swelling up at imaginary dangers, and
at the singular forms of new shadows, and at last settling down with
his nose at a mouse hole from which there seemed to be good ground for
his excited expectancy of a mouse.

One of the trunks which Jake had brought up from the station held bed
clothing, and Margery and Happie, with Polly to fetch and carry, fell
to making beds by the short April twilight.

Laura tried to arrange the bureaux, but the dainty toilette
accessories, which had been so pretty on the broad dressers at home,
looked sadly out of place on the yellow pine, the gray with red roses,
the high black walnut, and the brown bureau with the yellow and blue
stripes around the edges of the drawers, which constituted the outfit
of the Ark.

There were five bedrooms furnished, after their fashion, and two more
under the slanting kitchen roof which were unfurnished. The bedsteads
were painted pine and were old-time corded affairs, but none matched a
bureau--the state of things justified Laura's artistic despair.

But Happie began to sing as she spread the heterogeneous collection
of beds with their white, fine sheets and soft blankets, and this was
what she sang, improvising as she went, not poetically, but with better
results on the listeners than all poetry yields:

        "Now this is a lark;
        For fear of the dark
    We must all go to bed in a minute,
        For we can't see to toil
        Without any oil,
    And no lamp has a drop of oil in it
        But we're glad to embark
        In our seedy old Ark--
    If there's good to be had we will win it!"

"You're your mother's comforter, Happie, my sunshine!" cried Mrs.
Scollard, leaning towards her second daughter to pat the tousled head
bent as its owner stooped to tuck in a blanket.

"And your adopted aunt's reliance," added Miss Keren-happuch
unexpectedly from the adjoining room. And Happie felt that life was not
without promise.

Miss Bradbury tucked little Penny away with her until her mother
should be well enough to take her into her room. Laura and Polly were
roommates, as they had been in the Patty-Pans, and Margery and Happie
slept together, as they had all their lives.

The two eldest girls whispered long after they had gone to bed, and
silence had fallen upon the Ark. Happie was too excited to sleep,
Margery too miserable. To the eldest girl it seemed as if the life
upon which she had entered was going to prove unbearable, but to the
younger there appeared on the distant horizon gleams of hope. There
was a certain charm in all this discomfort, and that view was really
sublime. After Margery ceased to reply to her whispered remarks, Happie
still lay awake, planning, speculating, beginning to hope, yet half
crying too, as she remembered the dear Patty-Pans, and the only home
she had ever known, the great, noisy, ugly, splendid city. But at last
her mind settled down to contemplation of those glorious mountains
stretching away before her window, waiting for her to see them in the
morning, guarding her while she slept. In the thought of them she found
comfort, and gazing upon them in imagination, she fell asleep.




                              CHAPTER VI

                         MAKING THE BEST OF IT


HAPPIE was awakened "in her chamber towards the east" by the sun
streaming in upon her, and with a vague impression that the house was
on fire. Never had there been such a blaze of light at that hour in New
York, never at any hour such a resplendent, rosy glare. In the girls'
little chamber at home it had been at best but a lighter shade of gray
light, chastened by the air shaft, that summoned them to a new day.

Happie sprang up to greet the dawn and to look out at her
mountains--already it gave her a thrill of pleasure to feel that they
were _her_ mountains.

She awakened her sister with her cry of delight, Surely it was going
to be worth suffering much discomfort and deprivation to waken every
morning to such beauty as this. And when one remembered that the beauty
was to restore their mother, what did exile and more or less furniture
matter?

More beautiful than when clad in verdure the trees stood outlined
against the eastern sky, their perfect symmetry of line and limb thrown
into relief by the sunrise glow. Mists tinged with every exquisite tint
of color flowed around the mountainsides like the soft draperies of
Aurora. Quietly brown at her feet lay the waiting fields, except where
the rye of autumn's sowing was beginning to hint of coming green. Pines
and firs stood black against the sky, while the faintest tone of red
showed to a keen eye that the maple buds were forming and the fresh sap
running.

The glad bird chorus of later spring was wanting, but the blithe,
brave bluebird uttered his cheering note, liquid as the brooks which
taught it to him, and the robin defied possible frosts with his clarion
whistle, sounds the more delightful that they were the only spring
anthems yet audible.

Laura and Polly fluttered into the room as they heard Happie's
exclamation. Happie turned towards them with a shining face.

"Oh, girls, oh, Margery, isn't it heavenly?" she cried in an ecstasy.
"Really we must be happy here no matter how we hate it!"

A remark which her sisters hailed with such a shout of laughter that it
cheered their mother's waking across the hall.

"The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before
Him," said Margery softly. "I never before realized what that meant."

Even Laura scrambled into her clothes with considerable cheerfulness
after this auspicious beginning of the beginning, and the four girls
got down-stairs in good time and in good spirits.

But alas! for the weakness of human nature and the brief duration of
its exalted moods! When they began to grapple with the problem of
getting breakfast, and of persuading the stove to burn the wood which
Bob had piled ready to hand the night before, as if he had long been a
country boy used to gathering fuel, the benediction of the dawn began
to lose effect.

"Maybe we'd better wait for mother and Aunt Keren to advise us," said
Happie at last, sitting back on her heels with ashes on her hair and
despair on her face, having vainly blown the fire through the draughts
which did not draw.

"What's up?" inquired Bob entering in time to catch her suggestion.
"Say, I have to wash at the pump like a farm hand! I hope that freight
car will come to-day."

"We're up. So is mother--I heard her--but she isn't down," said Happie.
"This fire is too much for me, Bob."

"Don't you mean it is too little for you?" suggested Bob. "I don't see
how it possibly can be too much for you--there's none at all. I'll have
a try at it; I learned a trick about it last night. You have to light
the fire in the southeast corner of the grate--it's not cracked there."

Bob's knowledge of the geography of the cracked stove stood him in good
stead, and when Miss Bradbury and Mrs. Scollard came down the fire was
under way.

Miss Keren-happuch cracked her egg with a decisive blow on the edge of
a saucer--her establishment did not boast an egg cup.

"That Shale stratum which brought our trunks, and Bob and Happie,
last night, is going to lend himself, with the aid of Peter Kuntz,
our driver, to bringing up our household goods to-day, if the car
gets here, as they think it will," she said. "I never realized how
appropriately one's effects might be called _goods_--they will indeed
be goods to us in this dearth of everything. And the first thing I
shall do will be to find a woman to preside over our housework, for I
suspect that will be the attitude these independent farmers' wives will
take towards it. Bob, perhaps you had better look after the carting,
and we two Keren-happuchs, Happie my dear, will look for the woman--as
the proverb advises one to do whenever there is trouble."

"Why not ask Jake Shale if he knows of one? He is coming now,"
suggested Mrs. Scollard. Miss Bradbury hurried out to the steps.

"What is?" the family within heard him ask. "Some one to help you out?
I guess. Mebbe she might help you a little first along."

"She?" repeated Miss Bradbury.

"Her, yes," said Jake. "We hain't got so much work now to our place,
but she couldn't do it long."

"Oh, your wife!" exclaimed Miss Bradbury, enlightened. "If you will
bring her here, I will not look for any one else. You are sure she'll
come?"

"I guess," affirmed Jake. And he drove away with Bob on the seat beside
him.

The family hailed them with delight reappearing at noon, seated on
familiar crates piled high on the wagon. Jake not only brought his wife
when he came down in the afternoon, but his elongated son of eighteen,
who opened boxes industriously, but who could not be persuaded to open
his mouth.

As fast as Noah Shale pried open crates, his father and Bob carried
their contents to their place, and the new stove, their own chairs,
rugs, and the best beloved of the pictures, which were hurried into
something like order that afternoon, gave the forlorn old Ark a very
different aspect by the second night from that which it had worn on the
family's arrival.

Miss Bradbury surveyed her house by lamp-light--for she had bought
oil--with an amused criticism that held the germ of approval.

"Who can kalsomine?" she demanded suddenly of Mrs. Jake passing out of
the room to get a few sticks of wood for the hearth which to the joy
of all the exiles they found in the living-room, and with a perfect
draught.

"What is?" said Mrs. Shale stopping short. "I kin, fer one, and he kin,
and the boy could if he wanted, and you could--most anybody, I guess,
that wants to. Why did you want to know?"

"I'm going to make these walls clean, at least, upstairs and down,"
said Miss Bradbury, pointing to the blackened walls and ceilings which
seemed to indicate that the wood-fire on the hearth had not always
crackled and snapped as it was then doing.

"Make it look whiter," remarked Mrs. Shale, resuming her way with a
slightly superfluous statement.

Not only did grass have no chance to grow under Miss Bradbury's feet;
it could not so much as sprout. By the next day Jake Shale, young Noah
Shale and Peter Kuntz were all wielding kalsomine brushes upstairs and
down in the Ark, with Bob as an understudy learning with each stroke to
make the next one better.

White and sweet with lime on the morning of the fifth day of life in
it, the Ark reflected the sunshine on the wall of Happie's room when
she opened her eyes and aroused Margery.

They found Miss Bradbury in the living-room, bending over a trunk that
had not heretofore been opened. She turned to meet the girls' bright
faces with a smile on her own, and held up her finger warningly.

"It's only five o'clock," she whispered. "Don't wake your mother. This
comes of having such brilliant walls to make our eastward-looking
chambers light in the morning, girls. I hurried to dress, thinking it
was fully half-past six--my clock had stopped. This is the trunk of
silkalines and other possibilities of beauty at ten cents the yard.
Come and choose the color and pattern for the curtains in your own
room, Margery and Happie." She threw out several rolls of the prettiest
materials, and the girls plunged into them ecstatically.

"Oh, Aunt Keren, do you think it would matter to any one else if we had
this in our room?" cried Margery holding up a roll of silkaline, white
with soft green maiden hair fern wandering over it.

"But only look at this yellow jasmine, Margery!" cried Happie, holding
up a rival pattern.

"But green for our room with the morning sunshine to lighten it--would
you mind, Aunt Keren?" persisted Margery.

"Why should I tell you to choose if I minded?" said Aunt Keren, but
the pleasure in her eyes at their pleasure belied the gruffness of her
manner.

That day the entire population of the Ark, excepting Penny and Dorée,
but including Polly, worked on window curtains, hemming as fast as
feminine fingers could fly, and tacking and hanging as fast as Bob
could work.

When the sunset breeze wandered around the Ark, it found lovely
wistaria blossoms in their green leaves to flutter in Mrs. Scollard's
windows; the yellow jasmine responded to his fingers in Miss
Keren-happuch's room; Bob offered him crimson roses, Laura and Polly's
windows were hung with sweet pea blossoms, while the soft maiden hair
fern blew into the two eldest girls' room, brushing lightly against
the white counterpane on their bed. The newly kalsomined walls looked
fresh and restful, and the sash curtains transformed the exterior
scene, still bleak and forbidding.

But the Ark was doomed to ride on troublous waters for a time. The next
day Mrs. Jake announced that she must return to her bereft family, and
Miss Bradbury vainly went abroad in search of her successor.

"There is nothing for it, Charlotte and other children," said Miss
Bradbury, after two days of scouring the country in Jake Shale's open
wagon, "but for me to go to town and find some one there. Though how
I shall persuade a person accustomed to city improvements, or pretty
summer cottages, to come to our primitive Ark, I can't imagine.
However, I shall go down on Monday to try."

"Oh! And leave us alone!" cried Margery.

"Yes, _all_ of you alone. How can one leave 'us' alone? It doesn't seem
likely on the face of it that half a dozen Scollards could miss one
ancient Bradbury, does it?" said Miss Keren-happuch.

"You are the Head of the House, and it is hard to be decapitated, Aunt
Keren," said Bob. But decapitated they were on Monday, when the weather
wept copiously over their bereavement.

The inmates of the Ark awakened to the swish of rain against the small
window panes, and to the thought of Miss Bradbury's departure. They
discovered that in the few weeks that had passed since Mrs. Scollard
was taken ill, Miss Bradbury had come to seem as much and necessary a
part of their lives as their own heads and hands.

Happie and Bob met with dismal faces to offer their morning oblations
of wood to the stove.

"If the violets would come, I could bear it better," remarked Happie
suddenly.

"If the mud would dry up, and the roads get decent _I_ could bear it
better," retorted Bob. It was becoming a family joke, the number of
things which they discovered would make life in the Ark bearable. For
each of the family felt in the bottom of a courageous heart that the
new conditions were hard to bear, and every night Happie lay down
lonely and discouraged to wonder how she was going to face another day.
Somehow, though, that other day never would seem dreadful to her when
she opened her eyes upon it. It was always so beautiful, seen in the
light of the sun mounting over the hills before her chamber window.

"I have engaged our friend Pete Kuntz to make the garden this week
during my absence, and to put out our vegetables. Pete doesn't plant;
he 'puts out' seeds. I shall expect Bob to keep it watered if nature
fails us, as I should think she would have to after this flood--no
wonder we call this house the Ark!" said Miss Bradbury, as she pulled
on her gauntlets, and walked towards the door where Jake Shale was
waiting with his drooping steeds to take her to the station. "And
good-bye, my family. I shall return _with_ my shield, and not upon
it, for by fair means, if possible, but somehow in any case, I shall
inveigle a woman up here to work for us."

She nodded to each one, patted Mrs. Scollard on the shoulder as she
passed her--Miss Bradbury was not given to kissing--went out the door
into the drenching rain, mounted the dismal wagon and slowly drove away.

"Now, motherkins, and other girls," said Happie, wheeling towards the
door to hide her eyes, and hoping that the rising inflection which she
had forced into her voice might be mistaken for the ring of happiness,
"now, let's go up attic! We youngsters have been aching to get at it.
I'd like to see if rain on the old attic roof sounds as sweet as poetry
says it does--it's a good day to test it."

Margery sighed and Laura groaned. "It's perfectly dreadful!" she said.
"I don't see how you can help minding such weather! Think of living
here in such storms as this!"

"Yet fancy moving every time the weather changed, Laura," Happie
retorted. "We would have to leave an order with Pete Kuntz, Jake Shale
and some other teamsters like this: When the sun shines, don't come.
If it looks cloudy, keep your horses ready to start if it rains. Then
when it rains, hook up, as you would say, and drive right over to the
Ark, to move the Scollards, because the third Scollard girl can't live
in that house in stormy weather. Don't you think it might be hard to
make them understand, Laura? For instance, what would they do if it was
cloudy and misting a little? Or how would they know what to do in a
shower? No; it's better to live in a house and never mind the weather
once you have moved in."

Happie had rattled on, one eye on her mother's face, and was rewarded
by her laughing a little when she stopped; her nonsense usually made
her mother smile.

"Such a goose-girl, Happie!" she exclaimed. And Happie did not mind
Laura's pouting at being made fun of, for she had accomplished what
she had set out to do, and had tided her mother over the first
consciousness of being left alone.

"I hope Aunt Keren will find a nice, clean, rosy-faced girl to help us,
Margery," said Mrs. Scollard, as they mounted atticward.

"I wouldn't mind if she weren't young, and was as brown as a berry, if
only she were nice and clean, mama," said Margery pensively.

"Poor daughter! I'm afraid you find exile harder than the rest of us,"
said her mother, laying her hand on pretty Margery's arm.

"Not a bit!" declared Margery quickly. "It isn't hard for any of us,
for you are getting better!"

The steep attic stairs, intended apparently "for the use of flies,"
Happie remarked, issued into the single gabled room running the entire
length and width of the house, dusty and musty, dark in the heavy
storm, yet attractive with the charm no attic can escape. Happie
plunged under the eaves, followed by Penny and Dorée, who had come
up with them, the former singing in her crooning voice that sounded
very like the latter's purring, which was loud, for the yellow kitten
expected mice.

"There's an old trunk in here, motherums, a little hair trunk that has
gone quite bald in spots," Happie called in a muffled voice from under
the eaves. "It's as shabby as a trunk can be, but there are things
in it--it is heavy--and there's a B in brass nails on one end. The
Bittenbenders must have left it here. May we open it? What has become
of the Bittenbenders? What was a Bittenbender anyway? And why did they
go off and leave Aunt Keren their house, furnished, too, after its
way, and with their worn-off-horsehair trunk left behind?" And Happie
emerged from her dusty exploration, rubbing her nose violently, and
making up queer faces to keep from sneezing.

Her mother laughed. "I don't know what a Bittenbender was, Happie dear,
any more than you do. We know it was--collectively--the family who
owned this farm, and who owed Aunt Keren more money than this place
was worth, which was all that she could get in payment. Though if this
farm were taken care of, it could be made a good one. As to the trunk,
I'm sure Aunt Keren did not insist on that as a part of her bargain--it
must have been left because it was not worth taking."

"Don't open the trunk to-day, Hapsie," protested Margery. "I don't
like the rain on the roof nearly as well as I thought that I should.
And it's leaking around that gable, and it is so dark and damp and
dismal! Let's go down to the kitchen where it is warm and comparatively
cheerful. At least the fire is red! Truly I can't stand this dank,
dark, dreary, dusty, dismal hole and the beat of that rain."

"Poor Peggy! She's getting her adjectives high, and her spirits low!"
cried Happie. "What is it about attic salt? Hers is lumpy from wet
weather. Come on, you poor dear! We'll go down to the kitchen and boil
eggs. Mother, when do you suppose we shall get anything to eat besides
eggs? I asked Jake, and he said the butcher began coming through in
June. Now what in the world does the butcher come through? And aren't
we to have any meat till he has come through it? We cannot possibly
live on eggs till June. We've cooked them in every way by this time,
and they still come out eggs--more or less so, at least. For:

    'You may boil, you may scramble the rest, if you will,
    But the taste of the egglet will cling to it still.'

Laura, go first if you want to be noble, and be the cushion at the
bottom of the heap of your family when we all tumble down these
breakneck attic stairs!"

"Happie, what an absurd girl you are!" cried Margery. "Jake Shale meant
that the butcher came through Crestville after June, carrying meat to
the hotels beyond, and then we can get it easily enough. But it is
serious business getting it till then. Aunt Keren said she would bring
meat when she came back, and if she buys a horse, as she means to, we
can drive somewhere where it is to be had."

"Won't it be fun, jogging around the country picking up a roast here
and a chop there?" cried incorrigible Happie. "I hope it will be a
horse that we all can drive."

"Aunt Keren said she should buy a cheap horse, too tired to be
dangerous, and we are to rest him while we drive," said Laura,
unconscious of Miss Bradbury's humor, and repeating with entire gravity
this statement at which the others all laughed. "For my part," she
added, "I shall be mortified to drive such a horse."

"You can sit on the back seat and look like a guest; Margery and I
will drive," said Happie. She danced ahead of the others towards the
kitchen, swinging Penny to her shoulder as she ran. She stopped short
in the doorway with a shocked little cry.

"What's the matter?" said Margery.

"We have no horse to blush for, but we must blush for ourselves; the
bread has run over the pans, and down on the table! Only look! And we
are all so hungry! It must be as sour as sour! I'm so scatter-brained!"
And Happie pulled her own bright locks with a contrite face, offering
Penny the ear nearest the shoulder on which she was seated to be boxed.
But Penny kissed her sister's flushed cheek instead.




                              CHAPTER VII

                         THE DOVE'S ALIGHTING


"IT'S all my fault," cried Margery repentantly, assuming the blame and
the duty of repairing the damage to the snowy pine table at one and
the same time. "I promised to look after the bread and put it into the
oven, and between Aunt Keren's going and our trip to the attic, I never
thought of it again. Bread is not such a simple thing; I wish we could
buy our bread, as we did in town."

"No work is simple I find, dear," said her mother. "It takes all kinds
of qualities to do anything well--which accounts for the prevalence
of poor labor. Never mind the bread; it is beyond sweetening by any
amount of soda. We will make more to-night, and subsist on biscuits and
buckwheat cakes for dinner and supper."

"Buckwheat cakes are far from simple," Happie remarked, suggestively
surveying a burn on her forefinger, the result of her recent failure
with the delicacy in question.

"The cakes are simple; it's the griddle where the stick comes," said
Margery.

"Literally, if you mean the sticking," smiled her mother.

Laura, standing with her face pressed against the steaming glass of
the window pane, sighed heavily. Mrs. Scollard turned and crossing
over to her side, looked for a moment out upon the reeking scene. The
rain poured down in torrents, swept sidewise across the fields by the
roaring wind. The ground looked black at a little distance, the trees
bent their bare boughs to the storm's fury; not a sound, not a human
being lightened the desolation of the outlook.

The lonely woman felt her heart tighten under the grip of a fresh tide
of homesickness. Miss Bradbury had been trying of late to encourage her
by hinting that if she were not perfectly restored to health in the
autumn, she could spend the winter in the Ark, so at the worst there
was no reason for anxiety. But what a life to lead, to condemn her
clever children to! How could she bear it? Then the courage that made
her all that she was, the courage that Happie had inherited, rose to
answer her own question. She could bear it because she must bear it;
she would fight for her health, and be able once more to work and to
live for her children.

"When this storm has spent itself," she said brightly, "we shall see
the spring fairly leaping forward in all its loveliness. This is a
sort of aftermath of all winter's fury. It can't last long with such
a wind as this raging, and when it passes you girls will find arbutus
and hepatica, anemones, and very soon violets. It is going to be a
wonderful country for flowers, for all sorts of beauty. I think we
shall hear song birds in Crestville that we never heard before, and
fancy what it will be to hunt for wild flowers at the foot of those
glorious mountains! I think there could hardly be a more splendid view
than ours."

Happie crept up and peeped slyly over her mother's shoulder. She saw
a moisture on the long lashes that belied the blithe tone and the
enthusiasm.

"It's just a trifle dim now, motherums," was all that Happie said, but
the tone in which she said it made the words what they were meant to
be--the salute of a good soldier to the courage of his superior officer.

"Oh, by and by will be a sweeter by and by, of course," Margery chimed
in. "I suppose we shall all feel better when it clears up."

The dinner that day did not promise to be precisely a success. Polly
and Penny had risen superior to the weather in such a game of romps
that the baby appeared upon the scene decidedly cross. Bob came in wet
through and exhausted from a tussle with the barn door which had to be
rehung upon its broken hinges to protect the books still lying in their
packing cases, stored in the rickety building. He found it impossible
to talk; his muscles ached, he had pounded his thumb black and blue in
his efforts at carpentering, and creeping chills, the result of his
wetting, chased one another down his spine.

All that Happie had said of the preponderance of eggs in their limited
bill of fare was strictly true. It was hard to consider a dinner
satisfactory when its main dish was scrambled eggs, after one had had
boiled eggs for breakfast, and was looking forward to fried eggs for
supper. Dishes too had to be washed as they went along, for the supply
of kitchen utensils was low until the mistress of the house should
return with reinforcements.

"When we were in New York we turned a faucet, and took it for granted
that hot water in the sink was a natural institution, like a hot
spring. Now that we have to heat every drop we begin to realize it was
a sort of phenomenon," sighed Margery, lifting the teakettle to the
forward hole of the stove, and signaling Bob to put in another stick of
wood before she set it down.

"We will hope that Aunt Keren may find the clean, rosy-cheeked young
girl, or even the brown-faced-elderly-woman variation of the theme
which Margery suggested," said Mrs. Scollard. "It is rather a struggle
alone, without conveniences."

"There's a woman coming down the road, mama," said Polly, whose face,
with Penny's, was pressed against the steaming window, looking out upon
the universal wetness.

Laura dropped the towel, held ready for wiping dishes, though the water
was not yet warm, and ran to look.

"She's very wet, mama, and she's fearfully long," Laura announced.

"And she's heading for here!" cried Bob, as if that were the acme of
wonders.

"Can she be a lost Bittenbender?" suggested Happie.

The tall woman came in, when bidden to do so, and set herself,
marvelously erect, on the edge of a chair.

"It's a very severe rain," remarked Mrs. Scollard, somewhat at loss how
to treat her unexpected visitor.

"I've seen worse rains than this already," retorted the angular one.
"Do you like it here?"

"We shall grow to be very fond of the place," said Mrs. Scollard
cautiously. "We are trying not to be homesick. You see we have always
lived in New York."

"And you are doing your own work yet!" exclaimed the visitor. "I heard
you wasn't use to doin' nothin'. It's bad enough to be strangers
without takin' all the hard jobs to once, yet! I wouldn't care if I was
to help you a while; I've got time."

"Do you mean that you would stay here?" cried Mrs. Scollard, eagerly.

"Yes; I don't care if I do," answered the woman. "You just say so once,
and I'll stay."

"Are you a losted Bippenbender? Happie said so," Penny cried shrilly
and unexpectedly.

"A Bittenbender? What do you know about the Bittenbenders? No, I hain't
a Bittenbender. I'm poor enough in money without bein' poor truck
yet. My name's Rosie Gruber," said the stranger with an air of forever
setting at rest any possible doubt as to her desirability.

Margery and Happie exchanged a sly glance of amusement; anything less
like a rose than their caller would have been hard to find. But the
important point was that she was willing to stay and do housework.

Mrs. Scollard, feeling that Miss Keren-happuch's quest was more than
uncertain, and that almost any risk was better than their certain
troubles, engaged her on the spot, and was as delighted as she was
amused to see their new-bloomed Rose take off her wet hat, remove her
long overshoes, produce from under the skirt of her own gown a blue
checked gingham apron, and go down on her knees, instanter, to rake the
ashes out from the stove.

"This fire's pretty near out," she remarked. "If you want to eat at
twelve--you do, don't you?--you've got to get your potatoes over pretty
soon, and this fire'll need an hour to get up. Your wood's almost all;
hadn't you ought to git some?"

"Almost all what?" asked Bob. "Isn't it right; anything wrong with it?"

"It's almost all," repeated Rose firmly. "All--don't you know what that
is? How many sticks do you see there? Isn't it almost all? Nothin'
wrong with the wood if they was more of it. Say, there hain't nothin'
wrong with the boy, is they? He looks so sorter dumb at a body yet!"

"He didn't quite understand," said Mrs. Scollard gently, as Bob turned
away to conceal the broad grin spreading over his face as he caught
their new acquisition's meaning, and Happie bolted from the room.

Peculiarities of dialect did not affect the relish of the dinner which
this hardy Rose served at thirteen minutes after twelve. Everything did
taste so good to the hungry, weary and lonely Scollards! Margery and
Happie renewed their duets of old Patty-Pan days as they dried Rosie's
dishes, and their mother sat down to write Miss Bradbury of her coming,
and to tell her that she might return at once to the bosom of a greatly
cheered family, for the maid they wanted had found them, and search for
her on their side was no longer necessary.

The storm cleared away in the night, and the glorious sunrise of the
morning ushered in the spring. With it came soft brooding days in which
the grass and leaves wakened to life, the birds dropped down from the
warm sky in daily increasing kinds and numbers, and the flowers of
early May lifted up their delicate little faces. Polly and Penny came
home daily with wilting hepatica and anemones and violets in their
warm little hands, while the older children sought and found on their
rambles the arbutus whose sweetness the winds bore into the chambers
of the Ark, past the dainty new curtains.

Rosie proved a comfort in spite of angularity of form and peculiarities
of speech. She was such a balm to perturbed minds and weary muscles
that the children privately referred to her as "the Dove," for her
coming had been the harbinger of peace to the Ark. She evidently
regarded the entire family as helpless infants, needing her unceasing
care and vigilance, and she gave them no less than she deemed they
needed, piloting them through the waters of inexperience.

Miss Bradbury wrote that she was coming back. Margery and Happie
speculated on the effect of Rosie and her employer on each other, but
Happie felt sure that they would get on together, for each was in
her way a character, and their sterling honesty was of much the same
pattern.

Aunt Keren was going to bring them something that they would enjoy, "a
species of toy," so she wrote, yet something that she hoped to make
useful. They must get Jake to bring his three-seated wagon to the
station if the young Scollards came to meet her, as she hoped they
would.

They did, or at least Margery, Happie and Bob did, consumed with
curiosity as to what they should find encumbering Miss Bradbury.

When she stepped briskly off the car on the steps which the grade of
the track at Crestville compelled the porter to place for passengers,
the Scollards saw her encumbrance, and hailed it with a shout. There,
dismounting behind Miss Keren-happuch, so thoroughly laden that there
seemed no question that lady was already making him useful, his
cheerful face one mass of smiles, came Ralph Gordon!

Happie and Bob dashed at him regardless of a man with a fishing-pole,
come up for trout, and collided violently with the combination. The
brief mishap, though it left the traveler furious, did not dampen
Happie's ardor. She shook both Ralph's hands so hard, and exclaimed:
"Well, I never did!" so emphatically, and so many times, that there was
no doubt of her pleasure at seeing her former neighbor. Bob slapped him
on the back with such abandon that Ralph swallowed whole the durable
black licorice drop with which he had been beguiling the last moments
of the journey, and choked over it so violently that he had no breath
to reply to the questions his friends hurled at him in rapid succession.

"I thought that you might like a guest, a crumb from your Patty-Pans,
so to speak," said Miss Bradbury, surveying the effect of her surprise
with much satisfaction. "Ralph has had a cold, and has been working too
hard," she explained. "I need a boy to help Bob, so I took this one. I
shall expect you to keep him hard at work, allowing no time for talk or
play. How's your Charlotte-mother?"

"Better for your return, Aunt Keren," said Margery sweetly, but
truthfully.

"What about Snigs?" asked Happie.

"At home with his mother," returned Aunt Keren. "But he will come up in
the summer, by August, if not before."

"Is Ralph----" Happie began, but stopped herself before she had framed
a question that might have been awkward to answer.

Miss Keren-happuch finished it for her. "Going to stay?" she said.
"Yes, he is, or at least until something happens to call him home. Mrs.
Gordon yielded to my arguments, and consented to lending him to us. I
told her we needed him, especially Bob. So I captured him. Curious that
I went to get a girl, and brought home a boy, an altogether unforeseen
boy."

Jake Shale drove slowly up the hill. The young people talked
incessantly, and all together. Miss Bradbury listened in a pleased
silence that betrayed itself in her eyes, for her lips were unbending.
She saw that already the effect of her transplanting the Scollards
showed; they were blossoming out like the season under the warmth of
freedom from anxiety.

Miss Bradbury found to her surprise that she herself was glad to get
home, and thought of her coming in those terms. Down in the bottom
of her staunch old heart, the good woman had not looked forward to a
summer in the Ark with less than dread.

The children took Ralph out at once to display to him all the
interesting points of Miss Bradbury's estate, leaving its owner to
their mother, and to form the acquaintance of Rose Gruber, "the
Dove," whose olive branch was waxing greener in the eyes of all
the "Archeologists," as Bob called the inmates of the Ark. Though
Happie said that she thought they "were more like Architects, for the
dictionary said they made, built, planned, contrived, and that was a
full description of the Scollards."

"The creek is high," Rosie called after Bob and Happie, as they
followed Margery and Ralph out the side door.

"We are going over to it on our way back," Happie answered over her
shoulder. "It does seem to me a pity to call a beautiful trout brook
'a crick,' just as if it were a sort of rheumatism! Brooks sound like
lovely things, but cricks!" She ended her supplementary remarks to her
companions with a tiny shudder.

"Books are in running brooks; is that why you like them?" suggested
Ralph. "Or is it because they chatter, chatter as they flow--fellow
feeling, you know?" He glanced slyly at Happie. "Creeks ought to
chatter even more than brooks, being an American variety."

There was an old grist mill half a mile away from the Ark, turned,
when it did turn, by a beautiful stream, a trout brook made up of many
mountain springs, rising far up in the hills, and rushing through
Madison County to the river, which should bear them on to the sea.
Clear and brown were the waters of this brook, its bottom paved with
stones, its banks, rising steep on the one side, and gently sloping
on the other, grown with ferns, luxuriant with rhododendrons, and
surmounted with pines, spruce and giant maples. It was an enchanted
region to the Scollards, city bred, and "Patty-Pan" set hitherto. They
were delighted to take Ralph to the brook and show him that if the Ark
were shabby, the country was perfect--they discovered a strong sense of
proud proprietorship in their breasts as they introduced Ralph to their
haunts, and it dawned upon them that they must be beginning to feel at
home.

The brook was indeed high that day; the falls over the mill-dam were
yellow from the upstirring of recent rains, boiling and seething over
the logs creditably to their exhibitors, and the foam-flecked waters
ran swiftly down, under the bridge that crossed the road to their goal.

"Well, do you raise mermaids?" asked Ralph, pointing out into the
middle of the stream. Then before the others could speak, his face and
voice changed, and he cried out: "Good gracious, it's Penny!"

It was Penny, seated on a log which for the moment had lodged
midstream, held by a rock which could not hold it long. In her arms the
child held something yellow; Jeunesse Dorée, Happie saw at once. She
looked wet, her soft hair hung heavy around her pale little face, but
she held up her head valiantly, and clasped the kitten safe and dry to
her breast.

"Happie, oh, Happie!" she cried, as she saw the group on the bank, and
held out a hand appealingly. It nearly cost her balance; she shook on
her perilous seat, and Margery hid her face, while Happie caught her
breath.

Then she raised her voice and called: "Hold on, hold on tight, darling.
Bob's coming!" As she spoke the log swung loose, and floated a few
feet farther down the stream. Bob dashed out into the water, and Ralph
followed him. The brook was so high, the motion of the water so swift
that there was danger for one alone, should he lose his footing, and
Bob could not swim.

Steadying each other, the two boys waded out, keeping upright with
difficulty, and watching the rigid little figure towards which they
were struggling, fearing every moment that it would be jarred from its
perch.

The rocks were slippery under their feet, the water rose well above
their knees, logs and debris came against them, the log drifted ahead
of them, always a little further out of reach. Suddenly it struck
against the support of the bridge, and Penny's head disappeared under
the water.

It was Ralph, who, letting go of Bob's shoulder, threw himself downward
towards the spot where the child had disappeared. As he did so, he
heard the cry of anguish from the girls on the bank. He remembered,
with a prayer in his heart, that the little creature would drift far
more swiftly than the heavy log had done.

But in an instant she rose further down the stream, and Ralph struggled
to his feet and threw himself towards her, instinctively realizing that
he could reach her quicker by falling in her direction than by striving
to walk or to swim in that seething water. Little Penny's devotion to
her kitten was meeting its reward; clasping it tight to her breast, she
could not throw up her arms, and her light body floated long enough for
Ralph to seize it.

He pulled her towards him by her pink skirt, and Bob, seeing the
rescue, darted to his aid, lost his footing, fell headlong into the
water, but reached his friend nevertheless, and the two boys, with
Penny and Dorée, clambered up under the bridge none the worse for their
experience.

The terror-stricken girls ran, slipping and stumbling over rocks and
roots, to join them, and nearly dismembered Penny in the effort to hug
her simultaneously.

"We mustn't let mother see her like this; it would shock her too much
even to think of the danger now it's over," said Margery. "We will
take her to the barn and get Rosie to come there with water for a hot
bath, and we'll put dry clothes on the darling, and mother shall not
know of this till we are sure Penny's no worse for the scare. What were
you doing, Pennypet? How did you get on that dreadful log, out in the
middle of the brook?"

"I sat on it up by the dam," said Penny cheerfully--she was the least
frightened of the excited group. "The log was up there when I began
to sit on it, and Dorée was playing with me. He was playing he was a
goldfish and I was a pink water lily--'cause I've got on my pinkie
chamray, don't you see?" Penny indicated her best beloved pink chambray
frock as she spoke, looking ruefully at its wet folds. "Then the log
wented off--oh, Dorée and I played the goldfish had crawled up into the
pink water lily, and we were having the most fun! That's 'cause I was
holding him, don't you see? He had crawled up into the pink water lily,
truly. But the log wented down the brook, and we didn't know it was
going, but I wasn't much scared; I could hold Dorée, don't you see? And
you came--I didn't know Ralphie had come to the Nark!" She reached over
to pat Ralph's face. "I guess I could have sat on it ever so long--days
'n days!--only it bumped. I don't think Dorée's hurt." She peered
anxiously at shivering Dorée, who was wrapped in her wet garments,
making desperate efforts to get away and lick himself dry.

"I don't think he's at all hurt, you precious baby!" cried Happie.
"Give me Dorée; I can keep him warmer than you can, because you're so
wet. There! Now boys, hurry as fast as you can! You're both soaking,
and I'm afraid Penny'll be sick, and I'm shaking with cold; I'm so
nervous. Run!"

They ran, and by the time they had reached the barn, both the boys were
warmed up. Rosie came out and rubbed Penny into a glow, put her into
dry garments, and sent her forth, apparently as good as new.

Margery and Happie told the story of their adventure to Aunt Keren, but
not to their mother, who was not yet strong enough to be startled.

Miss Bradbury listened to it without a comment, but when it was
finished, she laid a hand caressingly on Ralph's arm. "I said I needed
a boy! But I didn't know I needed a coast guard," she remarked. "You
have begun your career in the Ark appropriately, Ralph; pulling in
people from the flood!"




                             CHAPTER VIII

                                GRETTA


"HAPPIE is beginning to be indeed happy, and without effort," said
Miss Bradbury in high satisfaction as she watched her pretty namesake
blossoming into increasing brightness every day. It was quite true that
Happie was beginning to be happy without effort. The first symptom
of her growing reconciliation with her new home was that the lively
correspondence with the friends whom she had left behind was abating;
she found the days too short for the delights that the farm had to
offer her, and she had less and less time for letter writing.

Happie had found a new interest in life besides the many interests of
her first country spring-time, and her growing intimacy with the wild
creatures,--an interest not unlike the latter, but far more absorbing.
And this is how it began.

One day she was walking alone down the roadside. The sun lay on her
head as warm as if it were June, and the dust rose under her feet. Out
of the tangled growth of the wayside came frequently the fluttering
of wings, or a squirrel in vociferous haste, whisking his tail and
scolding her.

She came up at last to the furthest boundary of the Ark farm, far
down on the margin of the brook, and to the house nearest to the Ark.
It interested her, because she had heard that in it lived a girl of
her own age, together with two women who had the reputation of being
decidedly cross, and of leading this young girl a hard life. They were
her cousins, without whose dubious shelter the girl would have been
homeless.

As Happie came up she caught a glimpse of a brownish sunbonnet, and
paused to peer at her unknown neighbor, herself hidden by a friendly
chestnut tree. She saw a pair of shoulders, unmistakably youthful,
covered by a faded but scrupulously clean gingham, and a plump brown
hand skilfully wielding a paint brush with which it was renewing the
storm-beaten red paint on the posts which upheld the wire fence forming
the farm boundary.

The girl stopped her work, and, with an upward movement of her arm,
threw off her sunbonnet with the back of her left hand, and drew her
arm across her warm brow. She had dark brown eyes, darker hair, and her
skin was as brown as a berry, but beautifully clear, and her cheeks
wore a flush as red as the tint of her red lips. She was so pretty
that Happie caught her breath with the pleasure almost all girls feel
in another girl's beauty, no matter what sarcasms are pronounced by
boys to the contrary. There was a warmth, a charm about this girl that
warm-hearted Happie was quick to feel, and with it a look of patience
that went to her heart.

"She needs a friend," thought Happie, and went forward without a
doubt in her mind that she could fill the want, not because she was
conceited, but because her motives were too pure, and her impulse too
kindly to allow a doubt of her reception.

"I think you must be Gretta Engel," she said, her sunny face wreathed
in smiles, as she came up to the painter.

The girl started violently, and blushed to the dark hair lying in damp
rings on her forehead. She quickly pulled her brown sunbonnet into
place, and stared at Happie without speaking, like a frightened rabbit
cowering beside the fence.

"I'm Happie Scollard, and I live--I'm living this summer--on the next
farm, the one that used to be Bittenbenders'," Happie continued. "I've
been anxious to know you; we're so near the same age, and such close
neighbors."

She paused for the reply which did not come, and then, for lack of it,
took up the conversation again.

"It's lovely here; those mountains are glorious. I was so lonely and
homesick at first I did not know how to bear it, but I'm getting
happier every day. It's a beautiful place, Crestville, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," returned Gretta.

"Have you always lived here?" asked Happie.

"Yes, I have," replied Gretta.

"And I used to live in a flat in New York; you can't imagine what a
change this is!" said Happie cheerfully.

"I guess," said Gretta, looking at the tip of her brush as if hoping it
might help her.

"Don't you get lonely here? I do, though there are so many of us,"
persisted Happie.

"Oh, I don't know; I don't get much time," said Gretta desperately,
looking about as if meditating flight from this determined girl with
whom she had not the slightest desire to make friends, and whose accent
and little air of being accustomed to another world than that of the
country girl embarrassed and annoyed her.

To her dismay, Happie seated herself on the grass at her side. "I don't
believe there's any risk in sitting on the grass, if it is only May,"
she said. "It's as warm as June, and it must be dry. I think you need a
friend, Gretta, and I want you to look at me hard and see if you don't
think I could be she. The girls in New York rather liked me."

She thrust her head forward, inviting inspection as she applied for the
position, and Gretta looked into the laughing eyes, and into the sweet,
dimpling face bent towards her. Her own dark eyes lighted with pleasure
in what she saw, and in spite of her shyness, she laughed a little.

"You don't want me for a friend; I'm different," she said.

"You look nice," announced Happie emphatically, "and I'd like to have
you try me. If you mean that I've lived in the city, and so had more
chance than you to get at books, besides having a clever and learned
duck of a mother to teach me, while you have been all your life
motherless, and far from libraries and good schools, besides being as
busy as a bee, I think that's more to your credit than mine. If we
liked each other, I could give you what I got out of books, and you
could teach me how to be useful--wouldn't that be a good bargain for us
both?"

Gretchen Engel turned to Happie with full appreciation of the kindly
tact that so delicately, yet firmly grappled with her unspoken
sensitiveness, and put on a level with herself the sweet girl, whose
advantages had been many, while hers had been none at all. Her eyes
filled with tears; she had a nature that was profoundly loving, and
she was starving for kindness. Something had set her apart from the
other girls who gathered with her through the winter in the little
schoolhouse, and she was scolded all day long for doing her patient
best in her meagre and reluctant home. Happie had guessed right that
she was desperately lonely; she had not begun to conjecture how lonely,
nor how much despair was mingling in that loneliness, though Gretta was
but a girl of fourteen. No one could have needed nor wanted a friend
more than pretty Gretta.

Seeing the sincerity that shone upon her from Happie's face, feeling
her lovableness as she felt the warmth of the May sunshine, Gretta
succumbed to her charm, forgetting to be shy.

"You're good," she said decidedly. "I'd like to be friends with you,
if you could stand me, but I don't know when we'd ever get to see each
other."

Happie gave a little hitch to her chin that meant determination.

"You must be outdoors a good deal to get that beautiful brown tint of
yours; it will be queer if we can't get together. I never saw a pair of
girls yet that couldn't outwit a pair of old cousins if they set out
to do it," she said. "They are your cousins with whom you live, aren't
they? Rosie Gruber is living with us, and she told me about you."

"I guess it didn't lose much in telling," said Gretta flushing. "I
hate to have folks pitying me, and saying what hard times I have. Not
but what it's true, though!" she added in a burst of self-pity and of
confidence in the sympathy which she read in Happie's face. "I wouldn't
care if I did work all the time, though girls that have mothers get a
little time to themselves, even when they're poor. But no matter what I
do, it's the wrong thing, and I get so sick of it that I 'most give up.
Yes, they're my cousins that I live with, and they grudge me a living,
though I earn one hard. I don't feel to owe them one thing; I guess
they'd have put me on the township, only they'd have had that much
bigger taxes, so they kept me. When I'm a year older I'm going off to
work for strangers. I believe I'd have asked your mother to have took
me, only I heard them telling you had nice things, and had lived in New
York, and I thought I wouldn't do for you."

"You poor Gretta!" exclaimed Happie patting the brown hand nearer to
her. "I don't see how you live! Here am I loved to death, the loveliest
mother a girl ever had, the best brother in all the world--Bob's a
perfect trump!--and Margery's so pretty and sweet you couldn't help
loving her--she's seventeen, and just bursting into young ladyhood.
And Laura, well, Laura's all right, of course, and Polly's the most
dependable, good little creature, and Penny--Penelope, the baby--is the
dearest little four-year-old you ever saw. To think I have all these,
and you have no one! It doesn't seem fair!"

"Yes, and you can go to school yet!" cried Gretta with a bitterness
that she had not shown before in speaking of her cousins. "They won't
let me go much, and we don't have good schools here anyway. That's why
I hate to see folks; I don't know anything, and they'll laugh at my way
of talking."

"Mercy, Gretta, that's nothing!" cried Happie energetically. "My mother
says if a person has brains, nothing can crush them; they'll prove
themselves in spite of obstacles, and if they haven't, no amount of
schooling can give them. Now that we're friends--for we are friends and
that's settled--I can help you lots, so easily that neither you nor I
will know it's done. You can speak just as well as any other girl, if
you won't mind a hint now and then, and I have loads of books to lend
you. And you must teach me practical things, milking--Aunt Keren's
going to get two cows--and churning and everything I don't know. Isn't
that a large order to fill? Why, I begin to see why I came here, over
and above mother's health!" Happie had grown brighter-eyed and more
enthusiastic as she talked. "Mother says each soul has certain tasks
set for it that no other soul can do, and that we are led along to
places where our work is ready for us, and that we must be careful not
to miss it when it comes to us. Maybe it was for your sake as well as
mama's that dear Aunt Keren brought us all up here to her farm, which
she had never seen, to spend this summer! Maybe it was because you were
so lonely and needed friends so much. You've such a strong, beautiful
face that I'm sure you are too fine not to get some slight chance to be
happy and clever."

Gretta looked keenly and quickly at Happie, suspecting mockery in these
compliments, for she mistrusted praise, having been carefully trained
to consider herself far below meriting it. She saw nothing but perfect
truth in the brown eyes gazing into her darker ones, eyes alight with
overflowing love and the joy of the thought that their owner might do
good to another who lacked so much.

[Illustration: "'CAN'T YOU EVER COME TO SEE ME?'"]

All the repressed riches of the country girl's nature leaped up to
meet the good offered her, caring less for the material good than for
the treasure of affection, inestimable to one to whom it had thus far
been denied, and who had more than most the capacity for receiving and
returning it.

Gretta struggled for adequate expression, and missed it; she could not
have voiced or understood what she felt at that moment.

"You're good," was what she said.

Happie understood. "So are you," she retorted. "And very lovable. That
makes us both good, so we will have good times. Now go on painting, or
you may get scolded. If I had a brush I think I could help you."

Gretta shook her head. "I'm used to scolding," she said. "And you'd get
red paint all over your dress."

She dipped her brush in the pot, carefully scraped it on the edge, and
made a vigorous stroke down the side of the post next in order.

"Can't you ever come to see me?" Happie asked as she watched her. "You
know our place, the Bittenbender farm?"

Gretta nodded. "Mrs. Bittenbender was my grandmother," she said.

"Not really!" cried Happie. "Why, I've been wondering about that
family, and you must know all about them! It seemed so queer for them
to go off and leave their furniture in the house. Of course there
isn't----" Happie stopped herself on the point of saying that there
was not much furniture, fearing that Gretta might mind it, and said
instead: "There isn't any reason why they shouldn't leave their
furniture, only most people take it with them, or sell it when they
move. And you are a Bittenbender!"

"No, indeed, I'm not!" cried Gretta. "My grandmother married Mr.
Bittenbender for her second husband. She was my father's mother, and so
her name was Engel before that. I guess her second husband mortgaged
the place, furniture and all, so he had to leave the furniture. But he
didn't have to give up the place if he hadn't wanted to. He had plenty
money; he was an old miser. That's why he liked better to keep his
money than to pay your aunt, so he gave up the place. My grandmother
died when I was a baby. I guess that old Isaac Bittenbender wasn't too
honest. My grandmother was a good woman, and they say she had a hard
life after she married him. He got too old to farm towards the last, so
he left your aunt take the place."

"He _let_ my aunt take the place," suggested Happie, fulfilling her
promise of hint-giving for Gretta's improvement. "They left an old,
worn-off horsehair trunk in the attic. Some day when you can, you must
come and open it. You are the nearest to being a representative of
the family whom we have found here, and I'm dying to investigate that
trunk."

"If there'd been anything in it worth seeing he wouldn't have
let--have left it," said Gretta. "They say he was the closest man
in Madison County. I heard he made my grandmother----" She stopped
suddenly to listen. "I hear Eunice calling; she's the crossest of my
cousins, if there's a difference. I've got to go."

She arose, and Happie was surprised to discover that her height
overtopped her own by a full head, for she had thought of her as she
sat as being rather short.

Gretta moved with a grace and dignity that also surprised her; there
was a freedom in every motion, and a splendor of poise won from her
intimacy with the mountains, which made Happie wish that she could see
her clad in beautiful garments. But the faded reddish gingham gown,
and the brown sunbonnet were far from unbecoming to the girl. Happie
said to herself: "Why, I thought she was pretty, but I believe she is a
beauty!"

Gretta stood for a moment dipping her brush uncertainly in and out
of her paint pot, not knowing how to take her leave, once more
self-conscious and embarrassed.

Happie solved the difficulty. "You won't mind if this Eunice does scold
now, will you, Gretta? And you won't feel lonely? Because we are going
to be friends forever and forever, amen." And she put her arm around
the faded gingham-clad waist.

Gretta drew off and looked at her. "Oh, I guess you don't want me!" she
said, But there was a ring of happiness in her voice, as if she were
sure of contradiction.

"You'll see!" laughed Happie, and kissed her new friend. "At any rate I
_think_ I want you. Good-bye till next time. Can you come to see me?"

"I don't know; I shall be painting this fence for the next few days,"
said Gretta suggestively, as she returned the kiss.

"All right," cried Happie triumphantly, and ran away waving her hand to
Gretta, who walked backwards looking after her, leaving a slight trail
of paint in her wake which threatened trouble for her when it should be
discovered.

"I have made friends with Gretta Engel," she announced, coming into
the dining-room where her family were busied with helping or waiting
for the dinner which Rosie Gruber was "dishing up."

"She's so handsome I couldn't tell you how handsome she is, and there
is something about her that draws you to her like a magnet! I'm going
to lend her books and give her pleasure, and she's going to do lots for
me. I shouldn't wonder if we came here for her sake--partly, at least."

Rosie surveyed Happie with high approval; of all the young Scollards,
Happie was her favorite.

"Gretta's the prettiest and brightest girl in Crestville," she
declared. "But she's awful shy. If you've got her to talk to you,
you've done wonders. And if you make her friends with you, you'll be
doin' the best thing you've ever done in your short life. If you was
to know the whole of Gretta's story, you'd think she'd had pretty hard
luck. I'm glad you hain't one of the sort of folks that can't see
through a faded dress, nor yet under a sunbonnet, Happie."

"If she's got Happie to take her up, she's had one piece of good luck,"
said Bob, who never hesitated to show publicly his appreciation of his
sister. "Happie makes every one else happy--that's a well-wearing,
well-worn family joke, Ralph--and she's not the sort to let them slip
back again into unhappiness because she gets tired of her bargain, are
you, Hapsie? Are you going to adopt your beauty?"

Margery, Laura and their mother laughed. The family had never exhausted
the fun of the story of Happie's adoption of a colored girl of twelve
when the young woman herself was at the suitable age of four. She had
insisted on bringing big Cora Jackson home with her, and on opening
her bank to take out her pennies to buy ice cream for her sustenance.
She had been much grieved when her protégée had been found to have
decamped, taking with her her little protector's gold shoulder pins, as
well as Margery's new parasol.

Happie now joined in the laugh, but gave her decided little hitch of
the chin.

"And if I did," she said, "it wouldn't be a bad plan. At least I
wouldn't scold her all day and every day, as her cross old cousins
do. And there's a great difference between the Cora Jackson of my
childhood, and this pretty Gretta of my old age! You wait till you see
her, Bob! She's far prettier than Allie Herford." Which was a home
thrust, for Bob considered Allie Herford the prettiest girl of his
acquaintance.

Ralph looked up quizzically. "Don't you mind 'em, Happie," he said. "I
believe in your four-leaf-clover-of-the-fields, and that you will find
her good luck. Besides, you must not let your young mind get embittered
by these cynics. 'It's better to have loved and lost than never to
have loved at all.' So it's better to invest your trust, even though
your bubbles--bust. Pardon the inelegance, Laura; I did not realize
that 'burst' only rhymed with 'trust' when it was 'bust,' until I was
too far embarked on my poem to tack--to carry on my metaphor with an
unmixedness that I hope you appreciate. Never mind if your Gretta
deceives you!"

"I never knew any other boy so imbued with the poets!" said Margery in
mock admiration of Ralph's outburst.

But Rosie, flying in and out with steaming dishes, was impressed only
by the matter, not the manner of his remarks.

"Don't you talk silly, Ralph Gordon," she said spiritedly. "Gretta
Engel never will deceive nobody. She will do Happie good too, and she's
made a good bargain yet. Your meat's fried most too much. Set up and
eat awhile before it gits cold."




                              CHAPTER IX

                          JUNE'S PERFECT DAYS


"DO you know we love the Ark?" said Happie to Margery, as they opened
the back door to let in all the glorious outdoors June time, having at
last succeeded in their ambition to get down one morning ahead of Rosie.

June had come softly, swiftly over the mountains, bringing all her
wealth of beauty to the exiles from the lesser treasures of the city,
a beautiful surprise in every hour. Robins were nesting in the gnarled
apple trees; Happie looked into their homes every morning when she
arose, sharing the happiness of the brooding mothers whose secrets she
jealously guarded.

Grass and clover were beginning to blossom to be ready for harvesting
on the fourth of July, cherries were reddening in the long sunshine of
the perfect days, and nature generously seconded the efforts of the
newcomers and of the carpenters in repairing and concealing damages to
the neglected buildings of the new-old home.

Ralph and Bob were busy building chicken houses and tinkering on sheds.
Miss Bradbury, in the innocence of her heart, had decided that it would
be good to keep chickens, and they had been added to the stock of the
Ark.

Rosie was most competent, slightly cross as quick workers are apt to
be, but she took the direction and care of the household upon her
shoulders, and Miss Bradbury was glad to overlook a snappishness which
was, as Margery said, "merely the snapping of the crust; not one bit
from her heart." It was worth while for the sake of being steered
through the waters of her inexperience of farm life. They all felt that
Penny was justified in her gravely uttered opinion that Rosie was "a
lovely lady."

The family had discovered that Rosie had had her share of sorrow,
represented by five child graves in the Methodist churchyard, and
a living husband who occasionally called upon her. This Mahlon was
working on a farm seven miles distant. Bob asked if he were employed
as a scarecrow, for a more limp, lazy, incompetent creature was never
seen outside The Wizard of Oz. He had a trick of standing on one leg,
and swinging the other in unison with the arm on the same side which
was an inexhaustible amusement to the children when he came to the
farm. He talked in a high, monotonous whine which gave his long thin
face the effect of a penny whistle emitting the sound--altogether a
sharper contrast to energetic Rosie that he was would have been hard
to imagine. The Scollards gathered that her struggle for existence
when her children were coming, and quickly going to fill those little
graves, had been harder than she said. They were glad for her sake, as
well as their own, that she had closed her forlorn house, sent off her
Mahlon to work in Zurich according to his ability, and had come to work
for them according to her own, very different ability.

Competent as Rosie was, however, she was but one woman, and there was
enough left for the girls to do to help her. Happie, on the whole and
allowing for those days when the grasshopper is a burden, reveled in
her tasks and sang about them all day long, getting brown and plump and
prettier for her activity. Margery never reached the point of enjoying
her share of the labor, which made it the more creditable that she
quietly performed it each day, never complaining, still less shirking,
for Margery had that fine conscientiousness which asks: "Should I?" and
never: "Would I?"

Rosie came down in less than ten minutes after the girls, and altered
the draughts of the stove instantly. Rosie always changed slightly
anything done by another, being imbued with doubts of others'
competency.

"What got you up so early?" she asked. "My alarm went off, but I laid a
minute plannin' my work for the day."

"I couldn't sleep, I was so excited about that horse," said Happie. "I
suppose I woke Margery, though I thought I was trying not to waken her.
Just as soon as breakfast is over, and the work done I want to go over
to tell Gretta about him."

Happie had gone on since she had scraped acquaintance with Gretta,
cultivating her all down the fence line as she painted. When the posts
were all done, and the double line of wire connecting gorgeous fresh
red posts, Happie had completely exorcized Gretta's shyness. She had
even followed her up when duty called her to decorate the posts nearest
to the house, and had braved the forbidding glare of Gretta's cousins'
eyes with such beaming unconsciousness of the possibility of any one's
objecting to Gretta's having a friend that she had escaped being
ordered away, as Gretta had prophesied that she would be.

"I'd hate to have them say anything to you," Gretta had said anxiously.

And Happie had laughed with a pat on Gretta's arm that was meant to be
reassuring, but which sent a great blob of red paint on the flagstone
walk.

"They won't say anything to me, Gretta," she had declared. "No one ever
does. I'll smile so sweetly, they can't reflect back a frown."

"I'll have to get that off with coal oil," Gretta remarked, regarding
the spot on the walk ruefully. "You don't know my cousins; they're not
very good looking-glasses. They frown anyway, and they don't reflect
you, no matter how you smile."

It was true that they did not reflect Happie's smiles, but neither did
they frown. They regarded her with icy impassivity, glad in their
hearts of a chance to see near by "one of the new folks" about whom
they felt so much curiosity, and reserving their right to prevent
Gretta's enjoying her when they saw fit.

Gretta was blossoming out under the new happiness and companionship;
she was full of a quiet humor that delighted Happie, and she imitated
her little niceties of speech with a quickness that rarely needed a
second hint. But Happie had not thus far been able to overcome her
shyness sufficiently to get her to meet any of the other inmates of the
Ark, whom Gretta avoided under one head, as "the rest." She had begun
to despair of ever making her one of their jolly little band when Don
Dolor Bonaparte came to her aid.

"What is it to-day, Happie?" asked Miss Bradbury, noting the symptoms
of haste in her namesake's breakfast preparations.

"I am going to trap Gretta with Don Dolor, Aunt Keren," laughed Happie.
"I want to run over and tell her there is a horse coming, and I hope I
shall be able to get her here to see him. You know Gretta is more than
fond of horses, and they say she knows more about them than half the
men around here; she can drive anything. I think I can coax her to the
Ark by pretending we want her opinion of Don Dolor Bonaparte."

"I'm afraid, judging from Mr. Hewett's letter, that her opinion of him
won't be high, and I'm certain she wouldn't have to be a horsewoman to
drive him," said Miss Bradbury. "But by all means bait your trap with
Don Dolor, and troll your woodland maiden to the Ark. I am curious to
see the girl that attracts you so strongly."

"I'm sure we shall love her if Happie does," added Mrs. Scollard. Her
cheeks were gaining a June tint. Smiling back at her, Happie thought
that it was not strange that they were all learning to love the farm
that was restoring her to them.

Happie hurried through her morning tasks and raced over to see Gretta.
She felt quite sure that at that hour she should find her carrying
water to the young lettuce plants which her cousins, Eunice and
Reba Neumann, were raising for the hotels five miles distant on the
mountains, which in July and August would be thronged with guests.

"Gretta, Gretta!" cried Happie waving her hands as she leaped the
garden fence. "Gretta, Aunt Keren has had a letter from Mr. Hewett, her
agent in New York, and he has sent up a horse. Bob and Ralph are going
down to the station this minute to bring him up. I think he must be
pretty bad, because this Mr. Hewett wrote that we were not to judge him
by our first impressions. He says he bought him for next to nothing,
but if he survives the journey, and we feed him well, we'll see that it
was not only a charity but an investment to buy him. He says he has
blood, though at first sight we shall think he has only bones. He says
his name is Don Dolor Bonaparte--only fancy! You've got to come back
with me and receive him. We don't any of us know anything about horses,
except Rosie, and you know a lot. So you come back with me, and tell me
what you think of poor Don Dolor." And artful Happie smiled alluringly.

Gretta looked up with a laugh in her dark eyes. "Maybe I don't see what
you're after!" she said. "You want to get me started coming; I know!
Truly, Happie, I don't like to see the rest. I don't know them, and if
I did get over being afraid of them, still, I would never get time to
visit. You bring the horse down the road and I'll see him there."

Happie folded her hands prayerfully. "Please, please, Gretta, come home
with me and see the new old horse! Look at me; don't I look pleading?
Have you the heart to say me nay, when I beg you with my paws folded,
like a nice little dog, and say _please_ so prettily?"

Gretta laughed. "You make folks do whatever you want," she said. "I'll
come if you'll wait till I get these plants watered, and change my
dress."

"I'll wait till the lettuce dresses itself for a salad and you for a
visit, if you like!" cried Happie triumphantly. "Bob and Ralph have
only just started for the station, and they won't get back for nearly
two hours anyway; Jake Shale took them down, and you know that is
slower than walking. So we've plenty of time."

"I've got to tell Eunice and Reba," said Gretta. "They may take a
notion to make me stay home."

"I believe you hope that they will!" cried Happie reproachfully. "See
here, Gretta, you'll find that the Scollards neither bark nor bite,
because it is their nature to--not! They are the nicest things, every
one of them! You'll like Margery better than me; that's my one fear in
bringing you together."

"I guess not," said Gretta looking up at Happie from her knees as she
weeded the lettuce with eyes full of dog-like devotion and admiration.

"You let me ask your cousins to let you go with me; they won't refuse
you to me, for shame's sake. You've finished all your work for the
morning," said Happie.

"Work's never finished," corrected Gretta out of her deeper experience.
"And we haven't had dinner."

"Maybe it won't take long to look over Don Dolor; he may not be a large
horse," suggested Happie. "Come along, Gretta."

Gretta ushered Happie into the fleckless kitchen. There were two gaunt
women, looking past sixty, though neither could have been much past
forty. One was stirring milk in a stone crock on the back of the stove,
which was just thickening into perfection for schmier-kase, while her
sister was tying on her sunbonnet with resolute jerks of the strings,
and hunting for the basket to bring in more wood. Her movements were
accompanied by a running fire of scolding about Gretta, to whose
account she set down the absence of the basket, which all the time hung
peacefully on a nail in full sight above the table.

"What's wrong with you?" demanded Reba, lifting the crock from the
stove and setting it down with the emphasis of its weight. "It's easier
using the wheelbarrow anyhow, but if you want the basket, there 'tis. I
guess you're getting near-sighted."

"I guess!" retorted Eunice derisively. "Why didn't you hang that there
basket alongside the stove? Here I've been a-huntin' and a-huntin' for
it," she added, catching sight of Gretta, and quite ignoring Happie.

"Good-morning, Miss Neumann," said that young lady, somewhat daunted
by the difficulties of this beginning, but holding to her courage. "My
aunt has a horse just arrived, and I'd like to have Gretta come over to
see him, please. You'll let her go, for a little while, won't you?"

"A horse? From the city? What good does she expect a city horse to be
on these mountains?" demanded Eunice. "She'd better bought one up here,
and saved the express on him yet!"

"Oh, I think this horse was sent into the country for his health,"
laughed Happie. "You will let Gretta come over, won't you?"

"How do you make out with Rosie Gruber?" inquired Eunice. "She's got
such a temper, folks say, Mahlon can't stay home. She hain't clean;
not what we call clean."

"Why, Miss Neumann!" cried Happie, shocked into undiplomatic defense of
Rosie. "She hasn't a bad temper; she's only a little, wee bit snappish,
and as to Mahlon, if it wasn't for Rosie he wouldn't have a home to
stay in--but of course you know that even better than I do! And she's
the cleanest woman! She's made our tumble-down old house as clean as
wax. Rosie's a treasure."

"That house you seem to think so poor of hadn't ought to be yours
anyhow," said the agreeable Eunice. "Old Bittenbender hadn't any right
to give it over to your folks. There's cheatin' somewheres, but we
couldn't never prove nothin'. 'Twan't his to give; we're certain of
that. It ought to belong to Gretta here, and if she had it she could
rent it out, or maybe take a couple of summer boarders after a year, or
a couple of years more, instead of bein' a cost to us who need all we
kin make for ourselves! Gretta, you git off that there bonnet and git
up the potatoes. What you standin' round fer? Hain't there always work
to do, I'd like to know?"

Gretta did not answer. She hung up her sunbonnet with quiet obedience,
and took the tin basin in which to fetch potatoes. She seemed to
recognize at once the uselessness of further pleas for her visit.

But Happie, seeing the clouding of the dark eyes and the look of shame
on the pretty face of her new friend, cried out: "Oh, Miss Neumann,
Gretta wouldn't be gone long! Won't you please, _please_ let her come
home with me? She hasn't been once! Are--you are going to let her come,
aren't you?"

"Well, I guess she hain't goin' visitin' before dinner!" said Eunice.
"She'd better not go no time. I tell her she'll find out what she'll
git, makin' friends with a city girl like you, that'll git tired of her
'soon's you've got used to her, and then where'll she be, with her head
all filled up with foolish notions, and tryin' to talk fine, like you
yet? I've got my eyes open; I see just what you're doin' with Gretta.
She'd better stick to her own folks, that's what _she'd_ better! She
come into the world to work, and she's got to work all her life. You
won't do her no good, makin' her discontented and then leavin' her.
I've been warnin' her, but she's like all girls--thinks she knows
more'n older folks! I'm glad I've got the chanct to tell you to your
face you'd better leave Gretta stay where you found her. I bet you
laugh at her now when you git home with the rest!"

Happie's eyes blazed. She took a step towards Eunice, drawing herself
up to the woman's height in her righteous indignation. Gretta quailed,
even while she rejoiced that this time Eunice had met one who did not
fear her.

"Miss Neumann," said Happie, trying to speak quietly, remembering that
this woman was much her elder, and the imprudence of angering her
further, for Gretta's sake. "Miss Neumann, I can't allow you to accuse
me of being double-faced. When I say I admire and like Gretta I mean
it, and when I speak _of_ her, I speak as I do _to_ her. If I were
so treacherous, so mean as to pretend to be her friend and then went
home and laughed at her I should be severely punished; my mother would
have no mercy on a hypocrite. But why should I laugh at Gretta? She
is pretty, gentle, refined, good, and patient as I never could be. I
like her very much, and she knows I do. I'm not going to drop her, and
I won't forget her. I wish you would not try to teach her to mistrust
me; it's not fair. And even if she did come into the world to work--I
suppose she did, because everybody has to work, one way or another--she
came into it for lots else, and I mean to help her find the rest. It
almost seems as if you grudged her love and pleasure. Of course you
don't, because you couldn't, but it almost seems so. Anyway you will
please never speak of me again as you did just now, because I can't
possibly be called double-faced."

Gretta's heart thrilled as she listened to her friend pouring out her
words more rapidly than her cousins had ever heard any one speak, but
clearly, and with a dignity that struck precisely the right note of
outraged honor and of self-restraint.

Eunice turned away her eyes from the girl's glowing ones; she felt the
force of Happie's justice and her own meanness.

"I don't see what you're going to do about it whatever I say, and I
hain't goin' to leave no one tell me what to talk about," she muttered.
"I don't care what Gretta does. We took her because we had to, and she
hain't never been grateful to us. If she wants to hang around you I
won't stop her, but she can't let her work undone. Gretta, when are you
goin' down cellar after them potatoes?"

"Now, Eunice," said Gretta. There was a new note in her quiet voice,
and she immediately turned to Happie. "I've got to help with dinner
now, Happie, and I may be busy a while after that, but I'll come over
this afternoon to your house."

Reba looked up quickly from the cheese which she was straining through
a cloth. "Yes, you go, Gretta," she said, and Happie went away
wondering.

She was not sufficiently versed in human nature to know that Gretta's
sudden accession of decision had come from two things. First, she
was emboldened by Happie's encounter with her cousin, but still more
was she forgetting herself, her dread of visiting, in the desire to
prove to her champion that she held to her faith in her unshaken, and
that she wished with all her loyal heart to make up to Happie for her
cousin's hatefulness. In her desire to show her confidence in her
friend and her gratitude to her, at last the fear of that vague "rest"
of the Scollards had been lost.

Happie reached home so excited by her adventure with Eunice that she
did not rush out to see the new horse as she had planned doing.
Instead she regaled her family with the story, almost forgetting to
eat, she talked so fast.

"Well, dear; I hope you weren't impertinent, but from what you tell me
I think you weren't," said her mother, when the long tale was finished.
"For Gretta's sake as well as your own you were obliged to vindicate
yourself from the charge of insincerity. And more years do not warrant
imputations on another's honor."

Rosie Gruber, taking part as usual in the family councils, here
interposed. "Of course she wasn't saucy; Happie's never saucy. The
idea of telling her to her face she was two-faced yet! You send them
Neumanns to me! I'll tell 'em how you're always talking about Gretta
and planning to help her! Two-faced, you! That's a good hint you give
her about grudging Gretta friends; you hit her there, and she knew it.
There never was such a jealous-hearted woman as Eunice Neumann. She
hates to see any one havin' a good time. When Reba was young she had
a beau--Eunice never did; there wa'n't a man in the township would
have darst to keep comp'ny with Eunice, but Reba had a beau. And if
that woman--girl she was then, but just the same's now at heart--if
she didn't hint round and fuss round till she got him to stop goin'
with her sister, then my name isn't Rosie Heimgegen, Rosie Gruber now!
Reba'd be different if she lived somewheres else. Eunice nags and nags
till Reba gits to snappin' back--there hain't many things so ketchin'
as snappin'. Eunice grudges Gretta her board and keep, though she earns
it good. She's mad to think Gretta's happier this summer. There is
folks like that, all sour and clabbered like schmier-case----My days!
That puts me in mind! I went off and let that pot too far front on the
fire! I wanted to hurry it a while, but I guess it's hurried too much."
And good Rosie rushed out to the rescue of her schmier-case, to which
she was trying to convert the family, hurried so fast that Jeunesse
Dorée fled to the windowsill for safety, a puff of nervousness.

Miss Bradbury looked at her namesake sternly, but there was a belying
twinkle in her eye. "What do you mean by embroiling me with my
neighbors, Keren-happuch?" she demanded.

"If the horse is Don Dolor, you are Donna Quixote, Happie," added Ralph
before Happie could reply to the inquiry of the head of the house.

"Oh, well, Aunt Keren, Happie thinks you might as well be embroiled
with this Eunice, I suppose, because she is making Gretta's life a
roast," said Bob coming to his sister's rescue. "I am curious to see
this field-flower--she must be a daisy!"

"She is," laughed Happie. "My goodness, she's coming now! She must have
hurried off right after her dinner! I was afraid her courage would fail
her when the time came. Bob and Ralph, slip out to the barn and don't
show yourselves until you come around with the horse--then there'll
be something to talk about, and she won't be shy with you. Margery,
you come out after me, soon, and speak to her without my introducing
you--you know how. Smile at her and speak in your soft voice, and
she'll never be frightened. I'll take Penny out with me; Gretta loves
babies, and Polly is too little to mind, so she can do what she likes.
And mama and Aunt Keren might slip out when we are in full swing with
Don Dolor, and Gretta may not realize she's meeting you. I guess she
won't be shy if we sort of leak out, and don't all face her at once.
Oh, Laura! Well, I think you'd better follow me at first."

"And what am I to do?" asked Rosie, amused, yet pleased with the pains
Happie was taking to launch Gretta smoothly on social waters.

"Oh, you can do whatever you please, and help us out. You understand
her, and she knows you. You make us laugh, Rosie. Come on with Happie,
Penny-tot."

"Cabbages and kings!" cried Bob. "It's worse than snaring a timid fawn,
or catch a dicky-bird with salt! I hope she's worth the trouble." And
he departed stableward with Ralph to carry out their part of Happie's
programme.




                               CHAPTER X

                          HAPPIE'S TEMPTATION


WHEN it was all over, and "the rest" had been met by easy and
reassuring stages, Bob said that he believed Gretta _was_ worth the
trouble. Happie was satisfied with this concession; she expected no
greater enthusiasm from Bob on the subject of a mere girl.

When Don Dolor was led out, Happie saw the force of his christening.
Polly said, without intent to be funny, that "he was more like a
clothes horse"; the framework of his anatomy was nearly as fully in
evidence.

"Oh, the poor thing!" cried Happie, instantly loving him because of his
unloveliness.

"My goodness, it's time he was sent into the country for his health!"
cried Gretta, shocked into forgetfulness of her shyness. "But he isn't
old, and he doesn't look sick; he's been starved and overworked. He'll
come out all right."

This dictum was a great comfort, for Gretta was supposed to know more
about horses than many of the Crestville men; she loved them, and had
learned about them through that love.

"I don't think he ought to walk about," said Polly anxiously. "He
looks as if he might go all to little bits. Can't you just rest him,
Bob?"

"We're going to let you ride him up and down in your doll carriage,
Polly," said Ralph.

"It isn't big enough," said serious Polly, and Gretta laughed as
heartily as the others.

Gentle Mrs. Scollard's greeting left the girl timid and awkward, while
Miss Keren-happuch she answered without hesitation, and with a laugh in
her eyes, to Happie's surprise, who had looked for the reverse effects.

Then Don Dolor was led back to his sore-needed rest, and as Gretta said
she must not stay this first time, Margery and Happie walked down the
road with her.

All down the road Margery laughed at Gretta's funny sayings, while
Happie looked as proud as a cat with a kitten.

"Come soon again, come often after tea," said Margery, as they paused
at the Neumann gate for the prolonged parting of girlhood.

"I shall," said Gretta with a prompt decisiveness that delighted
Happie. "After I get my work done, my cousins haven't any right to keep
me home, and I'm coming if you'll leave--let me."

"We'd be only too glad," said Margery heartily. "We haven't any girls
up here to run in; all our friends are in New York, so come up to keep
us from getting lonely, Gretta."

Happie only squeezed Gretta's hand. She was delighted that Margery and
her "treasure trove," as the boys called her, got on so well together,
and bright visions of Gretta's future danced before the warm brown eyes
which revealed to the world the love in Happie's generous heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week later Miss Bradbury came down in the morning with the ravages of
sleeplessness plainly visible on her face.

"I've heard noises all night," she said in reply to inquiries. "I don't
know what they were, but I dislike them. Boys, I wish you would drive
down to the store and buy that watchman's rattle we saw there, and stop
at Peter Kuntz' and tell him I'll buy his dog."

"There wouldn't be much use in rattling, dear Miss Keren," laughed Mrs.
Scollard. "Nobody could hear you."

"And don't you know you asked us to put those bean poles in the garden,
and set the pea brush?" added Bob. "They really need doing, and we
can't do that and go to the village too."

"Then Happie must get Gretta to drive down with her," said Miss
Bradbury decidedly. "I haven't been free from nerves all my life to let
them get the upper hand of me now without an effort to check them. I
must have the rattle and the dog. Don Dolor is able to make the trip
now."

He was. If any one doubted the effect of plenty of food and care, Don
Dolor Bonaparte, could he have met the sceptic, would have converted
him by the most eloquent of preaching--personal example. In that one
week he had become another horse. He had put on flesh, he had begun to
get glossy, he held up his head as hope awoke in his equine breast, and
he showed unmistakable symptoms of returning to the beauty that had
once been his. Bob was devoted to him; he had hard work to tear himself
from him long enough to perform his tasks on the farm, which were many
and irksome, and took a great deal of time.

When they had leisure, Bob and Ralph took their books into the orchard
where they allowed the don to graze while they read, prostrate in the
long grass. Poor Don Dolor appreciated the kindness to which he was not
accustomed. Sometimes when Bob was deep in his plot, the don would come
up and nose him caressingly as one who would say: "You can't imagine
how different all this is, nor how I thank you!"

So he was entirely able to go to the village in pursuit of his
mistress' rattle and dog, and Happie was only too glad of the chance
to borrow Gretta and take the drive. She had found the drive up from
the station almost too much for her on that April night when she had
first taken it, but how pleasant it was now to go slowly along the
shaded road, hearing the quail whistling in the fields, and the catbird
warbling his June ecstasy!

"Somehow I feel as if I had never seen the country till this year,"
said Happie looking about her with ineffable content as she and Gretta
wound carefully down the steep hill. "It's queer, because I used to go
away every summer till the last two, but I feel as if something had
awakened in me this year; it all seems different and lovelier."

"That's because you had a hard time before you came. It makes people
see and feel to have a hard time--unless it's a hard enough time to
dull them," said Gretta. "That's one reason, and the other is that you
have a home here this year. I never was away from here, but I'm pretty
sure no other place ever looks the way home does. You wouldn't see this
road as you do if you didn't feel your home was at one end of it."

Happie turned in her seat to look at Gretta. She considered her clever,
but she was perpetually surprised at the insight this girl betrayed,
now that she dared reveal herself.

"I see that's true when you say it, Gretta," she cried. "But I don't
believe I should have found it out for myself. How do you know things
like that?"

"I've been alone 'most all the time," said Gretta. "That makes a body
think; I always thought more than I talked. Then not having any real
home of my own makes a difference. I always felt I'd love my own home,
because I love Crestville so, even if I can't love Eunice's house much.
I guess it's because I've had hard times myself that I know what hard
times teaches people."

"Teach, dear, when there are more than one thing of which you are
speaking," said Happie, with a pat of apology for the correction.

But Gretta did not mind being corrected. "Teach, then," she said. "But
it seems queer to take off an s on one word, when you put it on the
other. I'll never learn."

"You learn wonderfully; it doesn't matter much anyway," said Happie
with a new perception of essentials of which she would not have been
capable a year before. "But it does matter that you have hard times!
Cheer up, pretty Gretta! I'm certain they won't last much longer."

"They're half over already since you came," said Gretta with her
adoring look.

"You love this place," Happie resumed, acknowledging this remark with a
squeeze, "and you'd like to live here all your days--you'd be perfectly
happy if you owned a house like the Ark, for instance. Yet here am I
wondering if I can stand living in it, for unless mother gets decidedly
better, Aunt Keren says we may stay on in the Ark all winter, and of
course we should have to. Isn't life queer and mixy? By the way, what
did your Cousin Eunice mean that day when she made me so hopping, by
saying you ought to own that house?"

"Nothing; just nonsense; Eunice is always saying things," said Gretta
hastily. Which was so true that Happie accepted the answer without
further thought.

They drew up at the little store, which was at once a miniature
department store and the post-office. A rail ran along the upper
side of the store for the convenience of customers whose horses
would not stand without tying; here the girls fastened the don, who
stood out quite beautiful in contrast to a dingy white horse on his
right, a horse all speckled with black, as if some one had been doing
spatterwork on him with an unsteady hand and too coarse a comb. On the
don's left, to enhance his line lines, drooped Joel Lange's _café au
lait_ mule, and Happie suddenly felt proud of her well-built steed.

Happie took her mail and followed Gretta to the other side of the
store. There were two letters for her mother, one for Margery and
three for herself, besides Miss Bradbury's daily budget of letters and
papers, and Ralph's equally reliable letter which came every day from
his mother and Snigs.

It proved how far Happie had traveled on the road to contentment and
interest in her new home that she no longer tore open her New York
missives with trembling fingers and brimming eyes as she had done
during her first six weeks of exile from her friends.

Gretta was buying blue and white checked gingham for aprons, thread,
outing flannel of a despondent shade of gray to match Eunice's sample,
stove blacking and a bread pan, bartering for a small portion of the
cost of these, twenty-seven eggs which her cousins had confided to her
care for this end.

Happie bought only darning cotton, but she invested in fig paste and
sour balls, the most attractive candy that she found in the boxes
ranged side by side in the show-case. They had red-lettered labels on
their ends of such misleading character that it was evident that they
were boxes remaining from bygone days, whose original contents had long
been pu

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