Patty looked uncertain. “I don’t know what to say,” she replied, hesitatingly. “I am cold; but I’m afraid it would delay us so long that Adèle will worry about us. I think we’d better jog along.”
But then another old lady appeared. She was rounder, rosier, plumper, and jollier than the first, and she cried out, heartily: “Jog along? Well, I reckon not! I jest waited to slip into my shoes,—my feet’s awful tender,—and then I come right out here to see what’s goin’ on. Now, you two young folks come right in, and set a spell. ’Tain’t often we get a chance to have comp’ny,—and on chicken pie day, too!”
“Whew, chicken pie!” exclaimed Philip. “How about it, Patty?”
“Have you a telephone?” asked Patty, with a sudden inspiration.
“Yes, miss. Now you jest come along. ’Kiah, the hired man, he’ll look after your horses, and I’m free to confess they need a rest and a feed, even if you don’t.”
“That’s so,” said Philip. “We must have come twelve or fifteen miles.”
“It’s all o’ that from Fern Falls. My, I’m right down glad to look after you two. You do seem to need it.”
The speaker’s twinkling dark eyes looked at her two visitors with such comprehension that Patty blushed and Philip smiled.
“We’re from Mr. Kenerley’s house,” he explained,—“guests there, you know. And we started for Hatton’s Corners to get some butter and eggs—and somehow, we took the wrong turn——”
“It was all my fault,” confessed Patty. “I insisted on coming this way, though Mr. Van Reypen thought the other was right.”