“If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll help a lot,” she told them.
“Oh, we’ve salted them. Shad told us that. We each took a bag of salt and went out sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly believe it was a tonic to the cut worm colony. The only thing to do, is go after them and annihilate them.”
Ralph lifted his cap in greeting to the group on the terrace, but went on up to the orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in her usual impulsive fashion.
“Do you suppose for one moment that the prince of Saskatoon is coming wooing my fair sister? Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d like to tell him she’s not for him,” she said, emphatically. “Now I believe that I’m a genius, but I have resources. I can do housework, and be the castle maid of all work, and smile and be a genius still, but Jean needs nourishing. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw her across his saddle bow and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much mistaken.”
Piney glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in her slow, deliberate fashion,
“I’m sure, I don’t know, but Ralph said he was coming back here every spring, so he can’t expect to take her away this year.”
Up in the orchard Mr. Robbins talked of apple culture, of the comparative virtues of Peck’s Pleasants and Shepherd Sweetings, and whether peaches would grow in Gilead’s climate. From the birch woods across the road there came the clinking of a cow bell where Buttercup led some young stock in search of good pasturage. Shad was busy mending the cultivator that had balked that morning, as he was weeding out the rows of June peas. He called over to Mr. Robbins for some advice, and the latter joined him.
Ralph threw himself down in the grass beside the little birch easel. Jean bent over her canvas, touching in some shadows on the trunks of the trees, absently. Her thoughts had wandered from the old orchard, as they did so often these days. It was the future that seemed more real to her, with its hopes and ambitions, than the present. Gilead was not one half so tangible as Campodino perched on the Campagna hills with the blue of the Mediterranean lapping at its feet.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss it all?” asked Ralph, suddenly.
“Perhaps,” she glanced down at him in Jean’s own peculiar, impersonal way. To Ralph, she had always been the little princess royal, ever since he had first met her, that night a year ago, in the spring gloaming. Dorrie and Kit had met the stranger more than half way, and even Helen, the fastidious, had liked him at first sight, but with Jean, there had always been a certain amount of reserve, her absorption in her work always had hedged her around with thorns of aloofness and apparent shyness. “But you see after all, no matter how far one goes, one always comes back, if there are those you love best waiting for you.”