"I'd like to start this moment, but I happened to think I could drive Jerry home, and then I can make the test of my experiment."
"Drive Jerry home——" his words reached the ears of the young people, coming into the hall. It was Friday evening and they had been at the moving-pictures.
"Who's going to drive Jerry home? You, Uncle Johnny? Can't I go, too? Oh, please, please——" Gyp fell upon him, pleadingly.
"Oh, I wish the girls could go," added Jerry.
"Why not?" Uncle Johnny turned to Mrs. Westley. "Then you wouldn't have to worry your head over clothes and hotel space at the seashore! And Mrs. Allan's up there across at Cobble with a house big enough for a dozen——"
"But they must stay at Sunnyside," protested Jerry, her face glowing.
Always, now, at the back of her head, were persistent thoughts of home. She had counted the days off on her little calendar; she saw, in the bright loveliness with which the springtime had dressed the city, only a proud vision of what her beloved Kettle must be like; she hunted violets on the slopes of Highacres and dreamed of the blossoming hepaticas in the Witches' Glade and the dear sun-shadowed corners where the bloodroot grew and the soft budding beauty of the birches that lined the trail up Kettle. She longed with a longing that hurt for her little garden—for the smell of the freshly-turned soil, for the first strawberries, for the fragrance of the lilacs that grew under her small window, for the clean, cool, grass-scented valley wind. And yet her heart was torn with the thought that those very days she had counted on her calendar marked the coming separation from Gyp and the schoolmates at Highacres—Highacres itself. She must go away from them all and all that they were doing and they would in time forget her, because they would know nothing of Sunnyside. And now, quite suddenly, a new and wonderful possibility unfolded—to have Gyp at home with mother and Little-Dad, sleeping in the tiny room under the gable, climbing the trails with her, working in the garden, playing with Bigboy, sharing all the precious joys of Kettle, meant a link; after that, there could be no real separation.
And she wanted Isobel, too. Between the two girls had sprung a wonderful understanding. Isobel was grateful that Jerry had not humiliated her by mentioning the debate, or the many other little meannesses of which she had been guilty; Jerry was glad that Isobel had not raked them up—it was so much nicer to just know that Isobel liked her now. Isobel was a very different girl since her accident—perhaps Uncle Johnny, alone, knew why. She had decided very suddenly that she did want to go to college. The week before she had "squeezed through" the college entrance exams—luck she did not deserve, she had declared with surprising frankness. And after college she planned to study interior decorating.
Everyone wondered why they had not thought before of such wonderful summer plans. Mrs. Westley would go with Tibby to Cousin Marcia's at Ocean Point in Maine—"quiet enough there"; Graham was going to a boys' camp in Vermont, and Isobel and Gyp could divide their time between Sunnyside and Cobble.
"We are not consulting Mrs. Travis," laughed Mrs. Westley.