"I'm going to help mother cut out; perhaps I'll come to meet you with
Bedelia 'long towards noon. You wait at Meeting-House Hill."
"I'm not going to be busy this morning," Patience insinuated.
"Oh, yes you are, young lady," Pauline told her. "Mother said you were to weed the aster bed."
Patience looked longingly after the two starting gayly off down the path, their cameras swung over their shoulders, then she looked disgustedly at the aster bed. It was quite the biggest of the smaller beds.—She didn't see what people wanted to plant so many asters for; she had never cared much for asters, she felt she should care even less about them in the future. Tiresome, stiff affairs!
By the time Tom and Hilary reached the old Cross-Roads' Meeting-House that morning, after a long roundabout ramble, Hilary, for one, was quite willing to sit down and wait for Pauline and the trap, and eat the great, juicy blackberries Tom gathered for her from the bushes along the road.
It had rained during the night and the air was crisp and fresh, with a hint of the coming fall. "Summer's surely on the down grade," Tom said, throwing himself on the bank beside Hilary.
"So Paul and I were lamenting this morning. I don't suppose it matters as much to you folks who are going off to school."
"Still it means another summer over," Tom said soberly. He was rather sorry that it was so—there could never be another summer quite so jolly and carefree. "And the breaking up of the club, I suppose?"
"I don't see why we need call it a break—just a discontinuance, for a time."
"And why that, even? There'll be a lot of you left, to keep it going."