"Why doesn't everbody have an old house, and let the squirrels in?" cried Helena, in a rapture.
In ten days more,—the first week of June,—Dorris came.
Well,—"That let in all the rest," Helena said, and Desire, may be, thought. "We shan't have it to ourselves any more."
The girls could all come down and call on Dorris Kincaid, and they did.
But Desire and Helena had the first of it; nobody else went right up into her room; nobody else helped her unpack and settle. And she was so delighted with all that they had done for her.
The dais was large enough for two or three to sit upon at once, and it was covered with green carpet of a small, mossy pattern, and the window was open into the butternut on one side, and into the honeysuckle on the other, and it was really a bower.
"I shall live ten hours in one," said Dorris.
"And you'll let me come and sleep with you some night, and hear the bats," said Helena.
The Ledwiths made a good link; they had known the Kincaids so well; if it had been only Dorris, alone, with her brother there, the Westover girls might have been shy of coming often. Since Kenneth had been at Miss Waite's, they had already grown a little less free of the beautiful woods that they had just found out and begun fairly to enjoy last autumn.
But the Ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by; there were plans continually.