The other girls arrived at dusk. T.O., her knee in a chair, had hitched laboriously from little kitchen to little dining-room and got supper. Spent and triumphant, she waited in the doorway. She could hear their voices coming up the road—Billy's excited voice, Laura Ann's gay one, Loraine's calm and sweet. She longed to run out to meet them. Next best, she sent her own voice, in a clear, long call.
"That's T.O.! Girls, let's run!" she heard Billy say.
"Why doesn't she run?" Laura Ann demanded severely. "That would be perfectly appropriate under the circumstances."
"'Tis queer, isn't it, that she didn't come to meet us?" Loraine added. In another moment they had reached Emmeline Camp's little green-painted house and found the Talented One waiting impatiently at the gate. Things explained themselves rapidly. Exclamations of pity crowded upon exclamations of delight and welcome. Four happy young wage-earners sat down to T.O.'s hardly-prepared little supper and four tongues were loosed. Even Loraine did her part of the chattering.
"I feel so nice and placid already!" enthused Billy.
"Oh, so do I!—so do I!" echoed Laura Ann. "It's such a comfort to get one's chains off!—I felt mine slip off back there at that dear, funny little station."
"Oh, was that what I heard clanking?" offered quiet Loraine, and was promptly cheered.
The meal was a merry one. And afterwards there was exploring to be done about the little yard and orchard and up and down the road, in the dim, sweet twilight, with the Talented One at the gate calling soft directions.
"And I've got a blue pump for you," she laughed. "Just wait till daylight! Don't anybody feel of it in the dark to see if it's blue, because you'll find it's green! There's a story goes with the pump and one with its mother—I mean with the boy-who-painted-its mother! Placid Pond is full of stories."
"Nice, dozy, placid ones, I suppose," Laura Ann returned lightly. But the Talented One shook her head.