“No; I was doing some bee sums. If one hive of bees—”
“Oh! I protest!”
“If all the other members of the family are happy bread-winners and money-getters, why shouldn’t the ‘belle’ of the family be one, too? Answer to that conundrum in the morning at the residence of Miss Joanna Brook, spinster.”
CHAPTER XX.
WISTARIA.
“WHAT a fine, substantial, aristocratic-looking old place it is!”
Isabelle’s thoughts, as she moved slowly up the long driveway to the Brook mansion, were almost envious. She had come across fields to fulfil the neighborly office which Miss Joanna had begged, and she had attached little importance to Bonny’s prophecy of a “delightful surprise” awaiting her.
Indeed, what would have made Beatrice extravagantly happy would have scarcely appealed to Isabelle at all. The elder girl was fighting valiantly to “down discontent,” but so far her efforts had not been crowned with marked success. To accept the simple life which God had ordered for her was a bitter trial. She was not the first who has imagined it would “be easy to do just right if—” in some other way one could arrange one’s life.
“Why couldn’t I have been born in such a home? Why need my mother toil as she does? And Roland, Bonny, even little Bob, has to think each day how best to increase the family income; while these old people, at the very end of life, have ten thousand times more than they can use or enjoy.”
It was, indeed, a “fine old place,” rich with the accumulations of nearly a century of ownership by the same, always wealthy family. It stood “four square to all the winds that blew,” its back and front so exactly alike that it could not be said to put its “finest to the world.” On either end, immense fluted columns rose to the roof, which, extending over the wide veranda thus formed, gave protection to those who would enjoy these “out-of-door rooms.”
The east veranda looked toward the river, the west upon the tree-lined avenue which led from the road, a quarter of a mile distant, through the park to the mansion. On either side, also, were gay parterres of choicest flowers, while a “maze” of old-time box borders invited the curious to tread its quaintly constructed paths for a full mile of windings in and out, before one could emerge on the northern side, and upon a well-kept bridle-road, which led through the great forest on the bluff, down its sides to the river, the old “embankments” and the well-preserved historic reminders of a day when the Chidly Brooks “had fought and bled for freedom’s cause.”