It was the beginning of many such evenings, distracting, uncertain, alluring but promising nothing, and the agricultural office suffered accordingly.
CHAPTER IX.
Very often, in planning his trips to examine the children’s school gardens, Billy arranged an itinerary touching the neighborhood of the Evison home, and took Marjorie with him. Very gay little picnics they had. A bank of violets or a nest of young robins never failed to move the girl to ecstasies. They generally stripped the bank of its flowers and she carried them away, withering, laced through her hair and knotted about her dress; and it took a great deal of moral support to keep her from taking the young robins out in her hand to feel the softness of their feathers.
“That’s the way I love things,” she pouted when Billy had warned her of the subsequent fate of the birds if she touched them. “If I want a thing I want it. Life must be very easy for you cool, slow-feeling people who can sort of stop and calculate before you know whether you really care about a thing or not.”
If the picnicking did claim undue importance and time in the garden examining, it did not save her from getting a few glimpses of the sterner phases of country life. In the middle of one hot July afternoon they drove up to a farm
home and found the woman bringing in lines and lines of fresh-smelling clothes. She had done the washing herself that morning and judging from the shine and order of her kitchen she had done several other things besides. She wasn’t dressed in any regulation afternoon costume; her gingham dress was turned in low at the neck and the sleeves rolled back at the elbows. A few little damp tendrils of hair cropped out from under her sun hat. She was thin and tanned and a little tired looking, but something about her gave a wholesome impression of health, happiness and usefulness. A perfect little Sandow of a boy a year or so old slept on the porch in a crib canopied over with mosquito netting, and two others in blue overalls hung shyly in the background.
Marjorie was surprised at the dignified kindness of the woman’s greeting. She wasn’t at all embarrassed to be found taking in her washing, but she put her basket down and gave her attention entirely to her visitors.
“I’ll take Miss Evison in where it’s cooler,” she said to Billy, “and when the boys have taken you over their garden they have something to show you in the house.”
The feature of interest in the house was a big velvety cyclopia moth, clinging sleepily to the
curtain—one of the rarest of Nature’s beautiful creations.