The tall clock in the front room struck four, and, with a little exclamation of surprise, Roxy said she must at once start for home.
“Roland is going to drive you over; he said he would,” Jasmine told her, and in a short time the two gray ponies harnessed to a pretty basket-phaeton trotted up to the porch and Roland helped Roxy to a seat beside him, while Jasmine, Myrtle and Ivy all promised to return her visit as soon as their mother came home.
“It’s the nicest visit I ever had!” Roxy called back to them, as the ponies trotted briskly off toward the highway.
CHAPTER VII
A RAINY DAY
“If you please I will get out at the bridge,” Roxy had told Roland, as the gray ponies trotted swiftly over the road that had seemed so endless a distance to Roxy only a few hours earlier. “I left a basket near the brook, and I can go home across the pasture,” she explained; and at the bridge Roland bade her good-bye, promising that his sisters would soon return her visit.
Roxy found her basket, and now hurried up the slope eager to tell her mother about the three little girls with such beautiful names: “Jasmine, Myrtle, Ivy,” and Roxy repeated them over admiringly. Then the swing under the apple trees, the bantam chickens! But suddenly Roxy’s happy smile vanished as she remembered that she would have to explain how she happened to leave Polly and walk the long distance to visit three little girls whom she had never seen.
And now Roxy remembered something even more important, and exclaimed aloud:
“I promised Grandma not to go beyond the bridge unless someone was with me!” And at the remembrance of this Roxy sank down on the hillside.
“How could I forget it!” she whispered. “And what will Grandma say? Oh, I can’t tell her!” And now Roxy instantly resolved to say nothing of her visit to the Hinham girls or of her running away from Polly.
“I’ll wait and tell Mother first,” she thought, and now went soberly on toward the house, stopping to empty her lunch basket for the benefit of a flock of chickens that were running about the slope.