They went out across the back meadow, the dogs leaping and barking on ahead, just as they had that August afternoon. A good deal had happened in the eight months since, Blue Bonnet thought; it did not seem as if any other eight months could ever bring so many new experiences; she felt considerably more than eight months older.
“What are you looking so sober over?” Alec asked.
“A great many things.”
They had reached the brook, and turning they followed it back along the way it had come until the woods were reached; here they went more slowly. The April woods were too lovely to be hurried through, Blue Bonnet thought, with the light falling soft and shimmering through the young green of the trees, and the Spring beauties making a delicate border for the brook, which laughed and splashed over the stones, as if it knew that at last the long winter were gone for good.
“Let’s go up to our old picnic place,” Blue Bonnet suggested, and they came at last to the open space where they had lunched that afternoon, with, it would seem, the very same squirrel eying them askance from the upper bough of a tall tree.
“Isn’t it nice here!” Blue Bonnet leaned back against the moss-covered trunk of an old tree. “Why couldn’t we come out here for school! It would be much more sensible!”
“From your point of view!”
Blue Bonnet passed a hand lovingly over the pink and white beauties which seemed to be smiling up at her. “And isn’t it good that at last all the fourteen can try for the Sargent? Billy got his discharge papers this noon.”
“I thought Mr. Hunt would prove amenable.”
“How soon do you send your paper in?” Blue Bonnet was picking a knot of the flowers for her blouse and did not look up; she hoped her question sounded sufficiently casual.