“It’s nice to have a thing done. I’m glad you’ve 43 taken to such a sensible employment,” commented Miss Gibbs.
“We like to have our fingers occupied, and then our minds haven’t time to wander,” said Raymonde, quoting so shamelessly from Miss Beasley that Fauvette kicked her surreptitiously in alarm.
Miss Gibbs regarded her for a moment with suspicion, but her eyes were bent demurely over her basket, and her expression was innocence personified.
“It’s as well you have something to do under cover, for I think it’s going to rain,” observed the mistress as she turned to leave the barn.
The girls watched her cross the courtyard and enter the house; then Fauvette, scooting in by the back way, had the further satisfaction of seeing the tail of her skirt whisking up the attic stairs. She ran back to report to Raymonde.
“Gibbie’s safe in her sanctum. She thinks we’re happily employed here for the next hour. Let’s bolt for the Limberlost! There’s nobody in the courtyard.”
“Right-o!” echoed Raymonde. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”
They did not wait to fetch hats, but, strolling down the flagged path as if for exercise, reached the great gate. Then, glancing cautiously round to see that the coast was absolutely clear, they unlatched the little postern door, slipped through, and shut it after them. A moment later they were running at top speed down the road that led to the wood. It was not a very great distance away, and they had often passed near it in their walks. To scramble over the palings and enter its cool, mysterious 44 shade had been their dream. They were resolved now to make it a reality.
They had been prepared for something delightful, but not for the little terrestrial paradise that spread itself at the farther side of the fence. The wood had been thinned comparatively recently, so that it admitted an unusual amount of light and air. The trees, just bursting into the tender green of early May, spread delicate lacy boughs overhead, like tender fingers held out to guard the treasures underneath. The ground below, still moist and boggy from the spring rains, was clothed with a carpet of dog violets, growing in such profusion that they seemed to stretch in a vista of palest mauve into the distance. At close intervals among these grew glorious clumps of golden cowslips and purple meadow orchis, taller and finer by far than those in the meadows, and deliciously fragrant. In the swampy hollows were yellow marsh marigolds and blue forget-me-nots; on the drier soil of the rising bank the wild hyacinths were just shaking open their bells, and heartsease here and there lifted coy heads to the sunlight.
Raymonde and Fauvette wandered about in ecstasy, picking great bunches of the flowers, and running from clump to clump with thrills of delight. Surely even Freckles’s “Limberlost” could not be more beautiful than this. A persistent cuckoo was calling in the meadow close by; a thrush with his brown throat all a-ruffle trilled in a birch tree overhead, and a blackbird warbled his heart out among the hazel bushes by the fence. The girls went peeping here and there and everywhere in quest of birds’ nests, and their diligent search was 45 amply rewarded. In the hollow of a decaying stump a robin was feeding five little gaping mouths, the blackbird’s mate guarded four speckled eggs, and three separate thrushes had pale-blue treasures in clay-lined cradles amidst the undergrowth.