Meg wakened up with a sort of start.
“I don’t know—exactly,” she said.
“You don’t know,” said the woman, good-naturedly. “You look as if you were thinking over a secret, and it was a pleasant one.”
That evening it was not cold when they sat in the Straw Parlor, and Meg told Robin about the bluebird.
“It gave me a strange feeling to hear it,” she said. “It seemed as if it was speaking to me. It said, ‘You must get ready. It is quite near.’”
They had made up their minds that they would go in June, before the weather became so hot that they might suffer from it.
“Because we have to consider everything,” was Robin’s idea. “We shall be walking about all the time, and we have no cool clothes, and we shall have no money to buy cool things; and if we should be ill, it would be worse for us than for children who have some one with them.”
In the little account-book they had calculated all they should own on the day their pilgrimage began. They had apportioned it all out: so much for the price of the railroad tickets, so much for entrance fees, and—not so much, but so little—oh, so little!—for their food and lodging.
“I have listened when Jones and the others were talking,” said Robin; “and they say that everybody who has room to spare, and wants to make money, is going to let every corner they have. So you see there will be sure to be people who have quite poor places that they would be obliged to rent cheap to people who are poor, like themselves. We will go through the small side streets and look.”
The first bluebird came again, day after day, and others came with it, until the swift dart of blue wings through the air and the delicious ripple of joyous sound were no longer rare things. The days grew warmer, and the men threw off their coats, and began to draw their shirt-sleeves across their foreheads when they were at work.