“Why not?” demanded Carin. “I’m great at finding four-leaf clovers. Why shouldn’t I find the perfect chaperon?” Half in expectation, half in despair, the two of them ran off down the sunny street, followed by the applause of Barbara Summers’ small brown hands.
“First,” said Carin, when they were beyond the hearing of their elders, “let’s go tell Annie Laurie.”
“Of course,” agreed Azalea. “Even if she doesn’t know of the right person, she must be told what we’re doing.”
It was not far from the Summers’ home to the rather gaunt house which Annie Laurie Pace had inherited. The girls made their way between the well-kept fields in which the fodder was raised for Annie Laurie’s fine herd of cattle—the celebrated Pace herd, which provided milk for half the county—and so came by carefully tended roads to their friend’s home.
Annie Laurie had been training vines to grow over the austere house, and had made flower gardens in the yard which until recently had worn a forbidding and business-like appearance. There was even an arbor about which clematis and wisteria were beginning to climb, and here, sparsely sheltered by shade, sat Miss Zillah Pace, the younger and gentler of Annie Laurie’s two aunts. There was a wistful look on her face and her hands lay idly in her lap, but when she saw the two girls she got to her feet and came swiftly forward to meet them.
“Oh,” she cried, “how very nice to see you on such a beautiful day! Everyone ought to be young to-day, oughtn’t they? I declare, I don’t see how I’m ever going to give up and be middle-aged if it means sitting around here at home season in and season out.”
“Were you such a very giddy girl, Miss Zillah?” asked Carin in amusement, casting an eye at Miss Zillah’s staid frock and prim little curls, and thinking how amusing it was that such a settled little person should be able to think of herself as adventurous.
“Not on the outside,” returned Miss Zillah. “When I was young I had a very great sense of duty, and there were many opportunities for me to exercise it. But do you know, I’m kind of worn out doing my duty, and I’d give anything if I were going away on some such jaunt as we went on last year.” She looked at the girls appealingly, and then concluded with a shy little smile, “I suppose you think I’m a dreadfully silly old woman.”
But Carin had clasped Azalea’s arm in a fierce grasp.
“The perfect chaperon,” she whispered, “made to order!”