The embarrassment that she had been dreading was not there! They were as simply glad to see each other as two children; laughing, she took the place beside him in the buggy.
He had never looked more cheerful. "So I caught you staring into the Marvens' windows!" he accused her.
She laughed again. "I am tempted to buy that little house," she told him.
"Why don't you?" he asked, lightly. "And go there to live, and take Timmy and Yetta with you!" He smiled down at her, indulgently, as at the fancies of a child.
"That was just precisely what I was thinking of doing," she replied. "We could be perfectly comfortable there during the winter. I don't want to go back to town one bit!"
"So you could," he agreed, still in his bantering tone. "And I wouldn't stop with Tim and Yetta. I'd take in a few more. You might borrow some little Allens, or get someone to lend you an orphan asylum."
Rosamund put her head back and laughed aloud, merrily. "But I am perfectly in earnest!" she cried; and was, from that moment.
But if the doctor refused to take the idea seriously, it was quite otherwise with Mother Cary. When Rosamund disclosed to her the half-formed plan—she had come to discuss nearly everything with that fount of human wisdom—the dear soul did not seem surprised at all, but at once made a thoroughly feminine mental leap into the very middle of arrangements.
"Why, of course, dearie, it will be just splendid! And you won't need so very many furnishin's. There's some cheers up in our loft you might take, and you can have things up from the city. Yetta's learned a good deal this summer. I can bake for you for a while, till the child gets more used to the work, and I reckon you can manage the rest of it betwixt you."
"Do you suppose," Rosamund asked, "that Grace Tobet would come, too?"