“Gee! This is luck,” Neil panted. “It’s John Zabriski that used to work for Father. He’s got the farm the other side of ours. He’ll take us all the way home.”
Jacqueline stretched herself upon the dirty sacks. The dust was rising round them in a golden cloud as the truck rolled down Longmeadow Street. The branches of the elms met overhead, and through them, as she lay on her back, she gazed into the unfathomable cobalt of the sky. There would be creamed codfish for supper, and Johnny-cake, and dried-apple pie. She had heard Grandma and Aunt Martha planning the meal. She could scuffle in the hammock with Neil and Dickie, in the warm, star-set evening, and tomorrow she meant to walk the highest beam in the barn. No one to forbid her—no one to remind her to be a lady—no starched and stuck up Cousin Penelope to give her orders.
“Gee!” murmured Jacqueline. “This sure is the life!”
CHAPTER XVII
OVER THE TEACUPS
Caroline and Aunt Eunice sat in the summer house, making doll clothes. The weather, like the Little Bear’s porridge, was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. A little breeze made the flowers in the garden curtsy like so many tall belles, arrayed in bright hues for a merrymaking at the court of the fairies. That was what Caroline told Aunt Eunice. She found it easy to tell Aunt Eunice all sorts of things.
Aunt Eunice sat in a cushioned wicker armchair, which Frank had brought out for her, and Caroline sat in a low rocker. Mildred sat on the bench at their elbow, lightly clad in a lace-edged camisole and snowy French drawers. She bore herself with the fine dignity and indifference that a queen of the ancient régime surrounded by her ladies in waiting would have shown in the like circumstances.
Aunt Eunice was frilling lace into a tiny sleeve. Caroline was setting her finest stitches in the hem of a silken skirt of peacock blue.
“When her new clothes are made, Aunt Eunice,” said Caroline, in her sweet, serious little voice, “I think we should let her go on a long journey to wonderful places.”
“I think so, too,” Aunt Eunice assented.
“Where should you like to go, Mildred?” asked Caroline. “To the Snow Queen’s palace in the cold, blue, frozen north? We are going to make you a cunning cape of black velvet with a white fur collar, and I’m sure it would be greatly admired by the snow elves. Only there are great silvery bears at the North Pole and they might fancy you for a tit-bit, my poor darling. I suppose, Aunt Eunice, they must get tired of eating just seals and Esquimaux and so on.”