“Where you going?” Freddie looked up to question in his turn.
“Nowhere,” Caroline told him, over a great lump in her dusty throat. Indeed there was no going farther. Least of all was it possible to turn back.
She left the children, and with dragging steps she walked across the side-yard to what must be the kitchen door of the farm-house. She stopped on the doorstep and looked through the screen door into an old-fashioned, low-ceiled kitchen. Pretty soon the room would be as familiar to her as Cousin Delia’s kitchen, with its faded linoleum and mud-colored wood-work. But now she found it strange, and rather terrible in its strangeness. If she didn’t knock quickly, she would lose courage and run away and hide—and there was no place to run to! She knocked quickly and loudly on the frame of the screen door.
In another moment a squarely-built woman, with a bibbed apron over her dark dress, came hurrying out from an inner room. She had keen gray eyes that in one second seemed to have taken in the whole of Caroline, from her dusty sandals (Jacqueline’s sandals!) to her brown leghorn hat.
“Bobbed brown hair and going on eleven,” the woman murmured, and then she threw the screen door wide open. “I guess I know who you are, this time,” she said, with a dry chuckle. “Come right in here, Caroline Tait.”
CHAPTER XL
TURN ABOUT AGAIN!
Jacqueline wasn’t at the Conway farm, when Caroline, in frantic quest of her, came stumbling into the kitchen, on Aunt Martha’s invitation. Instead she was down on the knoll by the river having a picnic with the young Conways.
It was a most unusually nice picnic. Dickie had gone early to the knoll, and with his Boy Scout lore had built a fire and set potatoes to roast in the hot embers. Some of them were a little underdone at supper time, and some were a little overdone, but smeared with butter, they tasted ever so much better than the baked potatoes that one ate off a plate at home in the dining room. Besides the potatoes there were apple turnovers, made with flaky pie crust, as a special treat. Aunt Martha had time to do some of the cooking herself, now that Grandma was able to sit up.
The picnickers left nothing for the birds but a very few crumbs, and they straggled home through the onion fields, just before sunset, fed-up and contented, so that even the thought of the good-night chores couldn’t damp their happiness.
“I’ll stir up a batch of Graham bread and set it to rise,” Jacqueline murmured, “but first I’ll give Annie and Freddie their baths. And you’ve got to take a bath, too—you hear me, Nellie? Not just your feet and a lick at your neck, but all over.”