Rosemary put the feeling into words one noon when the doctor came home to lunch and found her sitting on the floor beside a trunk with a lapful of rusty keys.
"Nothing fits," complained Rosemary. "All the keys to everything are lost. And I don't see what good a restful summer will do Mother if she has nervous prostration before she gets off."
Doctor Hugh settled several difficulties in as many minutes—he had a gift for that—by dispatching Sarah to the locksmith with soft-soap impressions of the keyless locks and orders to get keys to fit them and insisting that his mother must stay quietly in her room the remainder of the day and be served with luncheon and supper there.
"You girls try to talk all at once," he told his three sisters when they sat down at last to Winnie's rice waffles, "and that is enough to tire anyone.
"Can't I take the cat, Hugh?" urged Sarah anxiously. "You can take it in the car for me and I know fresh country air will be good for poor Esther."
"Esther wouldn't appreciate Rainbow Hill," said Doctor Hugh with conviction. "Cats don't like to change their homes, Sarah. Besides, you'll have all the animals you want once you are on the farm. And that reminds me I want to say one thing to you."
"I suppose," remarked Sarah plaintively, "you're going to scold."
"Not exactly," said her brother, smiling in spite of himself. "But while I want you to have a happy summer, Sarah, and 'collect' snakes and bugs and insects to your heart's content, I want you to understand clearly that the menagerie is to be kept outside of the house. Mother and Winnie mustn't be expected to get used to finding snakes in boxes and spiders in bottles, and the place to study a colony of ants is outside, not in the front hall. If I find you can't remember this one rule, you'll have to come back to Eastshore and stay with me during the week."
Sarah, with an unhappy recollection of the furore she had created the week before when she had bodily transplanted a thriving colony of ants to the hall rug, promised to remember.
"Jack Welles said he might come up for a couple of weeks and be a hired man," announced Rosemary, smiling.