"I didn't tell him how many churches, did I?" said Jean, when they drove away with Mr. Lampton's earnest promise to help. He was invited to attend a committee meeting at Greenacres the following Saturday.
Miss Titheradge of the Happy Valley Church was delighted with the idea. Jean liked her at first sight. She was rather plump, with wide brown eyes that never seemed to blink at all, and rosy cheeks.
"It's just what I've been telling the folks up here in these old granite hills. Get together, warm your hands at the fire of neighborly love and kindness. Have socials and all sorts of good times for your young people and your old people. Bless everybody's hearts, they only need stirring up and turning over, and the old fire burns afresh. Yes, I'll help, children."
"We're sure of Mr. Collins," said Piney, as they drove away this time. "I'll see him myself, and tell him about the committee meeting at your house on Saturday. Now we can find some of the girls."
Jean never forgot that afternoon. They drove miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the new material upon which she had to work.
At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved up from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.
"Ingeborg belonged to a basket ball team," Astrid said. "I can swim and row best."
The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Cousin Roxana's. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother's skirts at the stranger in the carriage and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, ah, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.
"They like ver' much to come, you see?" she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. "Ton-ee, I have shame for you, ma petite. Why you no come out, make nize bow? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, make quick!"
Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to put in the back of the wagon. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must drive around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.