“Mercy! do you know the time, Lyd? If we’re going to pick those wild strawberries for tea, we’d better be off at once. It’s almost three o’clock.”
And so she escaped telling Lyddy all she knew about what was behind the mysteriously locked green door at the end of the long corridor of the farmhouse.
Harris Colesworth, on his early Sunday morning jaunts to the swimming-hole in Pounder’s Brook, had discovered a patch of wild strawberries, and had told the girls. Up to this time Lyddy and ’Phemie had found little time in which to walk over the farm. As for traversing the rocky part of it, as old Mr. Colesworth and Professor Spink did, that was out of the question.
But fruit was high, and the chance to pick a dish for supper–enough for all the boarders–was a great temptation to the frugal Lyddy.
She caught up her sunbonnet and pail and followed her sister. ’Phemie’s bonnet was blue and Lyddy’s was pink. As they crossed the cornfield, their bright tin pails flashing in the afternoon sunlight, Grandma Castle saw them from the shady porch.
“What do you think about those two girls, Mrs. Chadwick?” she demanded of the little lame girl’s mother.
“I have been here so short a time I scarcely know how to answer that question, Mrs. Castle,” responded the other lady.
“I’ll tell you: They’re wonderful!” declared Grandma Castle. “If my granddaughters had half the get-up-and-get to ’em that Lydia and Euphemia have, I’d be as proud as Mrs. Lucifer! So I would.”
Meanwhile the girls of Hillcrest Farm had passed through the young corn–acres and acres of it, running clear down to Mr. Pritchett’s line–and climbed the stone fence into the upper pasture.
Here a path, winding among the huge boulders, brought them within sound of Pounder’s Brook. ’Phemie laughed now at the remembrance of her intimate acquaintance with that brook the day they had first come to Hillcrest.