“Ah, but you are like your mother, my dear!” Mrs. Clyde cried, holding the girl close. “It is very good of your uncle to spare you to us. I could hardly believe the good news when it came. But you are tired, dear; you shall go to your room at once.”
“I am tired,” Blue Bonnet said; she wondered why it was she wanted to cry. And why in this first moment of coming—coming home, Aunt Lucinda had called it—her thoughts kept going back to the home she had left.
She went with her aunt up the broad oak stairway and along the wide upper hall to a room at the lower end,—a big pleasant room,—the one that had been her mother’s. It was, indeed, a charming room, with its wide, cushioned window-seats, its deep, open fireplace, its pretty light furniture and delicate draperies. The windows looked off into orchard and garden, and, when Aunt Lucinda had gone downstairs again, Blue Bonnet went to kneel before the one overlooking the latter.
In a moment she had forgotten how tired and dusty she was; forgotten how far she had journeyed since the morning she said good-bye to Uncle Joe and old Benita and Don; had forgotten everything but the garden lying, half in shade, half in sunshine, below,—the big, rambling, old-fashioned garden, of which the one at home was a faint reproduction.
Beyond the garden was a tall row of trees, growing so closely together as to form a thick screen. Blue Bonnet wondered what was on the other side of that row? Did her grandmother’s land end on this side? Could there be neighbors so near?
She wondered a good deal about it as she freshened herself up for supper. Her trunk had not come yet, but she had a fresh white waist in her suit-case. Presently she came slowly along the hall and downstairs to where Mrs. Clyde was sitting in the broad entrance hall.
“It is very good to see a young person coming down those stairs again,” Mrs. Clyde said; “you come much more slowly than your mother used to, dear.”
Blue Bonnet smiled. “It seems odd to be going up and coming down stairs at all. At home it is all on one floor.” She went to stand by the open front door. Across the lawn and the broad road beyond, she caught glimpses of other big white houses, behind their sheltering trees.
“Oh,” she said, “if you only knew how delightful it seems to have real neighbors, Grandmother. At home our nearest neighbors were twenty miles away. I’ve been so hungry for people, and houses, and everything.”