“Oh goody, Aunt Martha!”
“Don’t crack my ribs, Jackie! You hug like a young bear.”
“I’ll start right after dinner——”
“No, you won’t, child. Ralph’s got to drive up to the north end of town. You can ride up with him ’bout two o’clock. He’ll pick you up at the Post Office long ’bout five. The library’s open to-day. You can sit in there when you get tired looking for cups in Miss Crevey’s, and Cyrus Hatton’s, and the Post Office. I suppose that’s what you’re calculating to do?”
“Y-yes,” Jacqueline admitted.
Privately she assured herself that it was no lie that she told. She certainly would go and hunt for cups in the three Longmeadow shops, but she would go only after she had seen Caroline.
At half past one by the kitchen clock, Jacqueline cast a proud glance at the bowl of stewed goose-berries, cooling on the table by the window, at the well-brushed floor, and the well-scrubbed sink, all the work of her hands. Then she skipped happily up the narrow stair, but softly, not to disturb Grandma, and in her old room, over the parlor, made ready for her trip to Longmeadow. She felt that bare ankles and Peggy Janes did not quite fit with the importance of her mission. She put on a pair of Caroline’s cotton socks, and the identical pink and white checked gingham in which she first had seen Caroline on the train.
As a last touch of elegance, she hunted for a hair-ribbon, and during the search in a top drawer, not so tidy as it might be, she came upon the box of Japanese lacquer, which she had half forgotten. Caroline’s treasures were in that box—the trinkets, the letters, the photograph—but of far more interest to Jacqueline was the old pink hair-ribbon bound round the box. She slipped it off, smoothed it across her knee, and tied her hair with a rather lop-sided bow. She didn’t altogether admire the effect, when she looked at herself in the mirror, but it was the best she could do, and as Grandma liked to say: “Angels could do no more.”
The drive into Longmeadow was not the jolliest pleasure trip imaginable. The road was dusty, and the little old car wheezed till you pitied it almost as if it were human. Besides, Ralph let it be clearly understood that he didn’t see the need for a girl, who did nothing but putter round the house, to take an afternoon off, and leave his mother to do everything. If Dickie, or Neil, now, had wanted a holiday, that would be different. Ralph, you see, was quite on the way to being a man.
“You make me tired,” Jacqueline told him loftily.