They received Aunt Jane’s letter in reply to their own, on Saturday.
“You two girls go ahead and do what you please inside or outside Hillcrest,” she wrote, “only don’t disturb the old doctor’s stuff in the lower rooms of the east ell. As long as you don’t burn the house down I don’t see that you can do any harm. And if you really think you can find folks foolish enough to want to live up there on the ridge, six miles from a lemon, why go ahead and do it. But I tell you frankly, girls, I’d want to be paid for doing it, and paid high!”
Then the kind, if brusk, old lady went on to tell them where to find many things packed away that they would need if they did succeed in getting boarders, including stores of linen, and blankets, and the like, as well as some good china and old silver, buried in one of the great chests in the attic.
However, nothing Aunt Jane could write could quench the girls’ enthusiasm. Already Lyddy and ’Phemie had written an advertisement for the city papers, and five dollars of Lyddy’s fast shrinking capital was to be set aside for putting their desires before the newspaper-reading public.
They could feel then that their new venture was really launched.
CHAPTER XI
AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE
It was scarcely dusk on Saturday when Lucas drove into the side yard at Hillcrest with the ponies hitched to a double-seated buckboard. Entertainments begin early in the rural districts.
The ponies had been clipped and looked less like animated cowhide trunks than they had when the Bray girls had first seen them and their young master in Bridleburg.