"Oh, Kit, when Cousin Roxy's only fifty-two! Do figure better than that. You'll have her like the Dauphins, betrothed when they were about three years old."
"And another thing I found out. Who do you suppose comes to see her regularly? The Billie person. She lets him run all over the house, and likes him immensely. We got real well acquainted. He calls her Aunt Roxy, and if you could ever see the amount of doughnuts and cookies and apple pie and whipped cream that boy consumes, you'd wonder how he ever managed to get home! They must starve him over at the Judge's. Cousin Roxy says he's so stingy that he'd pinch a penny till the Indian squealed."
Jean was fairly aching to tell all she knew, but a promise was a promise, and she kept it. That night, though, she dreamt that the Judge and Cousin Roxy were being married and that she was chasing them around with large portions of apple pie and whipped cream. Kit heard her say in her sleep, very plaintively,
"Please take it."
"Take what, Jeanie?" she asked sleepily, but Jean slumbered on without revealing the secret.
CHAPTER XX
ROXANA'S ROMANCE
Two weeks before school opened Helen came home. She was not changed at bit, Doris said admiringly, just as if she had been gone a year.
"Oh, I like it here so much better than at the Cove," she told them. "I wouldn't give our precious Greenacres for all the North Shore. Only I do kind of wonder about school, Mother dear."
"Doris will go to the District school at the village and Kit and Helen can drive over to the High School together. It is only five miles, and they can arrange to put the horse up at one of the stables. In severe weather Eric will take them over."