“Always,” said Tom, promptly. “It’s nip and tuck every time they come together. You’d think sometimes they fairly hated each other. But if one of them gets sick you ought to see how the other frets. Grandfather gets into a regular stew sometimes over her living off there by herself; but it’s a good thing she does. We couldn’t stand it if she lived here.”
“What supports her?” asked Kate, with her quick instinct for practical details.
“Supports her?” repeated Tom; “why, Aunt Katharine’s rich. Didn’t you know that? She had some property left to her years ago,—it was city land, I believe,—and it rose in value so it made a fortune. I heard grandfather say once that she must have as much as forty thousand dollars of her own.” The sum seemed unlimited wealth to the country boy. “Nobody knows what she’ll do with it,” he added; “she’ll want to fix it so the men can’t get it. She says she’d leave it to one of her female relatives if she could find one who’d promise never to marry.”
“She’d better propose that to Stella,” said Kate; “she’s so fond of her art.”
Tom whistled. “She isn’t so fond of it but she’d leave it quick enough if the right one asked her,” he said astutely.
And then they rose and walked together toward the house. Aunt Elsie, in the kitchen door, was calling, with an anxious note in her voice: “Girls, girls, why don’t you come in? You’re staying out in the dew too long.”
[CHAPTER VII—HUCKLEBERRYING]
It seemed as if a summer of ordinary time was compressed into that first fortnight at the old homestead. Esther wondered sometimes whether the surrounding hills, over whose tops the morning broke earlier, and in whose soft green hollows the twilights seemed to linger longer than any she had known before, had not something to do with the lifting of the days into the lengthened space of life and happiness. The charm of the New England landscape, its restful yet enticing beauty, its reserves, its revelations, had captured her fancy and her heart completely. Her letters were full of the new delight. Mrs. Northmore smiled as she read them, and felt that in Esther she was living over again the joys of her own girlhood.
As for Kate, she was feeling the new environment as keenly as her sister, but there was a difference in the letters. They were not rhapsodical, and they were sprinkled with questions, such, for instance, as, “Don’t we speak as correctly in the West as they do in New England?” “Isn’t it absurd to drop the r clear out of words, and do we over-do it?”
Between herself and Tom Saxon there was continual sharpshooting as to the relative merits of their respective sections, but it did not diminish in the least their relish for each other’s company. She rode with him in the mornings to the milk factory, and occasionally took down the load of cans in his stead. She went with him for the cows, and was regularly depended on as the person to take the luncheon to the hayfield in the middle of the forenoon. Sometimes she stopped and ate a doughnut with the workmen under the trees, but she had not yet developed a fondness for the peculiar beverage compounded of water, molasses, and vinegar, vaguely called “drink,” which seemed the approved liquid in this region for quenching the thirst of haymakers.