Annie Laurie laughed deep in her throat—and again her voice reminded one of an oriole’s.
“I do say it,” she said. “Your mother called it the Triple Alliance—the Three Girls’ Alliance.”
“We must swear fealty!” cried Azalea. She ran to the table and brought back Howard Pyle’s “Robin Hood,” in which the story of the forester and his faithful crew is told in equally beautiful words and pictures.
“Swear!” she commanded. Carin, laughing somewhat uncertainly, dropped her slender white hand on it. Annie Laurie laid her firm brown one over it; Azalea placed on top her sensitive, odd hand, which always quivered when she cared about anything.
“We swear,” they said in chorus.
The door opened and Miss Parkhurst entered, her arms full of books.
CHAPTER IV
A RAINY NIGHT
After that, the short days of winter passed as happily for the three girls as days can be expected to pass in a world which some discouraged person called “a vale of tears.” Alert as their minds were, each was decidedly different from the other, and they had the effect of spurring each other on. Carin was, of course, really more interested in her drawing and painting than in anything else, although she was a good student, too. Annie Laurie simply devoured books, and her happiest diversion was music. A good teacher came weekly from Rutherford, a town near by, to give her instruction. But Azalea took neither drawing nor singing lessons. She had much housework to do before and after school, and her long ride down the mountain each morning and back again at night, with the fatigue it entailed, had to be taken into account. Then she helped with the sewing and with the weaving, and so had neither time nor strength for anything else. Once Mrs. Carson said to her husband:
“Perhaps we were wrong not to insist on having Azalea live with us. It is true that few children have so much love and care given them as she has there with the dear McBirneys. But she has to share their poverty too, and their hard work. Do you think she will be worn out, Charles? Children seem so precious to me. I can’t bear to see their strength wasted.”
“My dear, she is being made into a very capable girl,” Mr. Carson answered reassuringly. “She is having the sort of training our pioneer ancestors had, and they grew stronger for their tasks and hardships. You and I are not going to live forever, you know, and our Carin will never want to take up the work we’re doing here among the mountain people. She’ll be off to Paris or Rome, I suppose, picture seeing and making. But here’s Azalea, in the most practical arts and crafts school possible. She sees the mountain handicrafts made every day right before her eyes, and when she’s grown she’ll be able to teach others. She’ll come in here and take up the work where we leave off.”