The first business of the day was to go for Paralee, who was of course to be their guide. Living as she did a mile or two back of Rowantree Hall, Azalea begged that they might pass through the Rowantree estate, giving her a chance to speak a word with Mary Cecily, whose haunting story stayed with her almost constantly—all the more, perhaps, because she had been forbidden to speak of it to anyone. The detour made for the purpose was not great, and presently they were pounding up the “approach” which Mr. Rowantree so prized. But on this occasion the master of the house was not sitting upon his gallery. Instead, they found him in the “drawing-room,” clad in a snuff-covered silk dressing gown, reading from an old red-bound copy of “The Lady of the Lake” to the twins, Moira and Michael, while little Mrs. Rowantree got the breakfast.
“The vocation I should have chosen,” he said to his guests after they were seated, “is teaching the young mind to expand. It is, I may say, one of the few things which really interest me.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Rowantree, bustling about to serve her guests with hot coffee, “I can’t tell you what a help it is to me, having Mr. Rowantree amuse the children the way he does.”
“Wouldn’t ‘instruct’ be a better word than ‘amuse,’ my dear?” asked her husband.
“Oh, indeed, you do instruct as well as amuse them,” she cried loyally. “You instruct us all.”
“He didn’t amuse nor instruct me none,” said Haystack Thompson when they were on their way again. “A great hulk of a man a-setting around while his little wife lugs in the firewood!”
“It would be horrible, the way she works and the way he loafs,” said Keefe, “if it weren’t that she is happy. She likes to be doing things for him and the children.”
“He sure is a loafer,” mused Haystack. “I know, because I’m a loafer myself and I can recognize one when I see him. But he puts on airs with his loafing, and I swan, I don’t like that. But say, he’s got cute children, ain’t he? That there little Constance said if I’d stay she’d call me ‘uncle.’” He laughed in a flattered way at the remembrance of it.
They were soon at the little cabin where Paralee lived with her grandmother and her brother. The brother they learned, was already off at the sawmill, but the grandmother, bent double with age, with two sharp teeth protruding from otherwise toothless jaws, and with her face brown and furrowed, came out to see her granddaughter’s guests. Her gimlet eyes seemed to bore through them. She looked as if she knew many things which she would not tell, and which, indeed, she ought not to tell. Carin had brought her sketch book, and was eager to make a drawing of old granny Panther, but she was given no time, for Paralee was awaiting them, ready and impatient to lead them on. She had no horse, but she said she wanted none.
“I can keep up with your horses,” she told Azalea.