And the girls opened their eyes to find that the fire in the living room had died down and the quiet of evening settled on the house.
Yet for an instant they seemed to hear a far-off echo of the shrilling of the bag-pipes.
CHAPTER XI
A Summer Day with Ramona
“Oh, I wish it was summer,” sighed Ruth, looking out at the bleak landscape. “It looks as though it never in this world could be summer again, doesn’t it? I wonder if it ever forgets to come—wouldn’t it be awful, Rose, if it did! Just think, waiting and waiting, and thinking that surely next week summer would come, and still it didn’t, until it was winter-time again!”
“Yes, that would be awful,” agreed Rose, joining her sister at the window and looking out with her. “But wouldn’t it be nice if it forgot to be winter sometime, and summer kept right on? That’s the way it is in the tropics, I s’pose. Why don’t the inventors invent a way to spread summer all over? Spring and summer and fall and then spring right off.”
“Of course, we couldn’t ever play in the snow,” Ruth remarked.
“I Hum-mm.”
“And it would be funny to have Christmas in summer.”
“Yep, that’s true. I guess bits of winter are imperative.”
“What’s imperative?”