“And waffles are no good when they have to stand,” added Huldah meaningly.
This hint was enough to send Christopher at a flying leap up the front stairs.
“I’ll show you the pups in the morning,” repeated Jane with exasperating calmness, following and watching his hasty ablutions from the bath-room door.
“Humph!” answered Christopher with ingratitude, as he splashed the water resentfully. “I guess I can find the pups easy enough—if I want to see ’em. And I know something you don’t know. A circus is coming to town next week, so there!”
“I did know it, but it’s not coming for two weeks. There’s a lovely horseback rider in it and grandfather said perhaps he’d take us,” replied Jane.
Then, carried away by the remembered charms of the circus posters, the twins linked arms and ran down to supper, their slight disagreement already forgotten.
Thus life settled down at Sunnycrest, happy and peaceful for the most part; always interesting but with now and then a little cloud of disappointment or regret overshadowing the sky of their sunny content—which, alas, is apt to be the way in life at every age.
Jane was rather sorry that Jo Perkins had come to work on the farm. He took Christopher away from her so often. To be sure there were a great many things that they could do all together; hunt for eggs, feed the chickens, milk the cows (for Jane and Christopher both learned to milk). But when Perk took Christopher fishing, Jane was not invited to go. Christopher soon developed into quite a sportsman, and begged his grandfather for a gun—Jane turned pale when she heard the request—to shoot some of the rabbits that ran so thick in the woods. But this grandfather positively refused to allow, nor would he permit Perk to carry a gun when Christopher was with him. So the two boys were obliged to content their sporting taste with fishing-rods and angleworms.
Whenever she thought about it, Jane felt surprised and a bit hurt at this ready abandonment of her by Christopher, but her own time was so filled up before long that at times she hardly missed him. Her little woman’s soul took as thriftily to household duties as the boy’s instinct turned to sport. Huldah found her nimble fingers of real use in shelling peas, beating eggs and sifting flour. Indeed, seldom had Huldah’s cake been so light, for in her zeal Jane sifted and resifted the flour and beat the eggs to such a stiffness that it seemed as if they would have to be broken up to stir into the batter, Huldah said.
But grandmother did not encourage indoor work to any great extent, and Jane spent many blissful hours in the orchard with her family of dolls, always in sight of either grandmother’s or Huldah’s watchful eye. For although the twins had reached the dignity of nine years, they were seldom left to their own devices for long at a time. Grandfather and grandmother felt their responsibility too strongly to take any risks, for had they not promised the anxious parents across the sea to take the best of care of these precious children?