"We'll let Kit drive over and see them," she promised.
Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit a while, Cousin Roxy said. One day the earth still looked wind-swept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.
One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons' pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods, and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. Keenest and sweetest it sounded over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.
"It's the peep frogs," called Honey, coming up from the barn with Buttercup's creamy contribution to the family commonwealth. "They're just waking up. That means it's spring for sure."
"Isn't it dear of them to try and tell us all about it," Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Helen come straight out-of-doors and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the veranda, two by two. Once Helen stopped below their father's window to call up to him in the long "Coo-ee!" their mother had taught them from her own girlhood days out in California on her grandfather's ranch.
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Doris herself, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging. The little nurse had left Greenacres the fifteenth of April both because of his gain in health and also to decrease expenses.
"And you needn't worry about anything at all, Mother darling," Kit had assured her. "Just keep right upstairs with Dad and let us girls run the kitchen, and we'll feed you on beautiful surprises."
Mr. Robbins smiled over at them, and quoted teasingly:
"The Chameleon's food I eat;
Look you, the air, promise crammed."
Piney paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls received their first real information about the other girl neighbors around Gilead Center.