Spring marched on apace those days. The garden at Hillcrest began to take form, and the green things sprouted beautifully. Lucas Pritchett was working very hard, for his father did not allow him to neglect any of his regular work to keep the contract the young man had made with Lyddy Bray.
In another line the prospect for a crop was anxiously canvassed, too. The eggs Lyddy had sent for had arrived and, after running the incubator for a couple of days to make sure that they understood it, the girls put the hundred eggs into the trays.
The eggs were guaranteed sixty per cent. fertile and after eight days they tested them as Trent had advised. They left eighty-seven eggs in the incubator after the test.
But the incubator took an enormous amount of attention–at least, the girls thought it did.
This was not so bad by day; but they went to bed tired enough at night, and Lyddy was sure the lamp should be looked to at midnight.
It was three o’clock the first night before ’Phemie awoke with a start, and lay with throbbing pulse and with some sound ringing in her ears which she could not explain immediately. But almost at once she recalled another night–their first one at Hillcrest–when she had gone rambling about the lower floor of the old house.
But she thought of the incubator and leaped out of bed. The lamp might have flared up and cooked all those eggs. Or it might have expired and left them to freeze out there in the washhouse.
She did not arouse Lyddy, but slipped into her wrapper and slippers and crept downstairs with her candle. There had been a sound that aroused her. She heard somebody moving about the kitchen.
“Surely father hasn’t got up–he promised he wouldn’t,” thought ’Phemie.
She was not afraid of outside marauders now. Both Mr. Somers and young Mr. Colesworth were in the house. ’Phemie went boldly into the kitchen from the hall.