“But what if there is a conspiracy of happiness afoot? Then you have nothing to say, and I have talked with your cousin, and she has written to another cousin, Roxy, I think she calls her. Ah, you have such wonderful women cousins, Giovanna, they are all fairy godmothers I think.”
Jean liked to be called Giovanna. It gave her a curious feeling of belonging to that life Carlota told her of, in the terra cotta colored villa among the old terraces and rose gardens overlooking the sea. She remembered some of Browning’s short poems that she had always liked, the little fragment beginning,
“Your ghost should walk, you lover of trees,
In a wind swept gap of the Pyrenees.”
“If you keep on day dreaming over possibilities, Jean Robbins,” she told herself in her mirror, “you’ll be quite as bad as Helen. You keep your two feet on the ground, and stop fluttering wings.”
Whereupon for the remainder of the stay at Cousin Beth’s, she bent to study with a will, until Easter week loomed near, and it was time to think of starting for the hills once more. Carlota was going with her, and so excited and expectant over the trip that the Contessa declared she almost felt like accompanying them, just to discover this marvelous charm that seemed to enfold Greenacres and its girls.
CHAPTER XVII
BILLIE’S FIGHTING CHANCE
It was the Friday before Easter when they arrived. Jean looked around eagerly as she jumped to the platform, wondering which of the family would drive down to meet them, but instead of Kit or Shad, Ralph McRae stepped up to her with outstretched hand. All the way from Saskatoon, she thought, and just the same as he was a year before. As Kit had said then, in describing him:
“He doesn’t look as if he could be the hero, but he’d always be the hero’s best friend, like Mercutio was to Romeo, or Gratiano to Benvolio. If he couldn’t be Robin Hood, he’d be Will Scarlet, not Alan a Dale. I couldn’t imagine him ever singing serenades.”
Jean introduced him to Carlota, who greeted him in her pretty, half foreign way, and Mr. Briggs waved a welcome as he trundled the express truck past them down the platform.