"I hope he does," approved the doctor promptly. "He'll find it an endurance test and a particularly valuable one. Yes, Winnie?"
"I wish you'd step out and look at the canna bed," said Winnie grimly. "Every single plant pulled out and left dying in the sun."
"Why, I did that," declared Shirley in her clear little voice that always reminded Winnie of a robin's chirp. "I thought Mother would want to take the cannas to Rainbow Hill with us—we can plant them around the porch there."
Doctor Hugh pushed back his chair, his mouth twitching.
"Whatever happens this summer, Winnie," he said gravely, "something tells me that you won't be bored."
CHAPTER III
RAINBOW HILL
A white clapboarded house with moss-green shutters and a dark oak "Dutch" door, the upper half of which swung hospitably open—this was Rainbow Hill in the light of the late June afternoon sun. A little jewel of a house set in the center of a close-cropped emerald-green lawn and circled by sturdy old trees, elms and maples that had marked the site of the old homestead and now guarded the "new house" as it had been called ever since it had been built six years before to replace the farmhouse destroyed by fire.
"Welcome to Rainbow Hill," said Mrs. Joseph Hildreth, coming out on the red tiled walk as a car swept up to the door and stopped.