She smiled a little. "What did Ada say?" she asked, rather shyly.
"I have not been favored with Ada's opinion, but she and her mother are to pay me a short visit presently. George wanted me to come immediately to New York, but I fancied Jessie must be a trifle homesick; and, to confess the truth, I was longing for a glimpse of Brookside. Have you begun gardening yet, Kathie? And tell me the story of the whole winter. I'm just famishing for gossip."
Uncle Robert proposed returning presently, but they would not listen to his taking Kathie. Mr. Meredith begged her and Jessie to have tea up in the room, where he could look at them. His side was still very weak, and his journey had fatigued him too much to admit of his sitting up. "But I shall soon be about with a crutch," he announced, gayly.
Passing the lodge cottage again that evening, Kathie gave a tender thought to its inmates, and the childish longing for fairy power came back to her. No wand, nothing but a Fortunatus's purse with one piece of gold in it, and that could not do everything.
Kathie was up betimes the next morning. There were lessons to study, an exercise to write, and a music practice to be sandwiched in somewhere, for Mr. Lawrence was to come that afternoon. And her head was still so full of Mr. Meredith and dear Jessie.
"It will not do," she said, presently, to herself, when she found that she was listening to every bird, and watching the cloud of motes in the sunshine; so with that she set to work in good earnest.
Belle Hadden was loftier than ever on this day, and seemed to hold herself quite apart. "A new kink of grandeur," Emma Lauriston said.
Lottie Thorne always had the earliest news. Now she made sundry mysterious confidences, prefaced with, "Would you have believed it?"
"What is that, Lottie?" asked one of the girls.