Although the real farewells had been said on that evening, that was not quite the last of it, for the girls were gathered in a body by the church the next morning when Edna drove by on her way to the train. She was squeezed in the back seat of the carriage between her mother and her Aunt Alice. Ben was on the front seat with his grandfather. Reliance at the gate was waving a tearful farewell, a white kitten under one arm and a grey one under the other. Grandma herself stood in the doorway. "Good-by! Good-by!" sounded fainter and fainter from Reliance, but the word was taken up by the girls who shouted a perfect chorus of good-bys as the black horses trotted nimbly along and bore Edna out of sight.
CHAPTER XII
HOW ARE YOU?
In what seemed an incredibly short time, Edna was getting out at the station nearest her own home. Ben and his mother had parted from them an hour before and were now on their way to their own home. Ben, however, would return on Monday to take up his college work again.
"There they are!" were the first words Edna heard as she and her mother descended from the train. And then the boys rushed forward to hug and kiss both herself and her mother and to make as much fuss over them as if they had been gone a year.
"Gee! but I'm glad to see you," cried Charlie. "It hasn't seemed like home at all without you, mother."
"Didn't you have a good time at Mrs. Porter's?" asked Edna.
"Had a high old time," responded Frank. "Here, let me take some of those things. You look like country travellers with all those bundles. What you got there?"
"Oh, things," returned Edna vaguely. "All sorts of things the girls gave me to bring home."