“My! how pretty! They look just as if they were made out of velvet in the milliner’s window! And how did you know all that about the colors?”
“Oh! Father John, and Mr. Winters—Uncle Seth, he likes me to call him—the dear man that gave us the Water Lily—they told me. Though I guessed some things myself. You can’t help that, you know, when you love anything. I think, I just do think, that the little bits of things which grow right under a body’s feet are enough to make one glad forever. Sometime, when I grow up, if Aunt Betty’s willing, and I don’t have to work for my living, I shall build us a little house right in the woods and live there.”
“Pshaw, Dolly Doodles! You couldn’t build a house if you tried. And you’d get mighty sick of staying in the woods all the time, with nobody coming to visit you——” remarked Mabel coming up behind them.
“I should have the birds and the squirrels, and all the lovely creatures that live in the forest!”
“And wild-cats, and rattlesnakes, and horrid buggy things! Who’d see any of your new clothes?”
“I shouldn’t want any. I’d wear one frock till it fell to pieces——”
“You wouldn’t be let! Mrs. Calvert’s awful particular about your things.”
“That’s so,” commented Aurora. “They’re terrible plain but they look just right, somehow. Righter ’n mine do, Gerry says, though I don’t believe they cost near as much.”
“Well, we didn’t come into these lovely woods to talk about clothes. Anybody can make clothes but only the dear God can make a cardinal flower!” cried Dorothy, springing up, with a sudden sweet reverence on her mobile face.