“Jean Craig, you’re catching it!” she gasped. “You’re talking exactly like Becky.”
“What if I am. I don’t care,” answered Jean blithely, “it’s common sense. Save the pieces.”
“She who used to be most concerned about what she was going to wear to the next formal has suddenly changed her tune,” murmured Kit. “I marvel.”
She looked down at the garden, windswept and bare in the last chilly days of February. Yet there was a hint of spring in the air. An early robin was perched near the grape arbor they had all enjoyed so much, with its luscious grapes and ceiling of green leaves. Leading from it to the hedged garden at the back was a flagged walk.
The garage was of reddish fieldstone and, like the house, covered with ivy. A tall privet hedge enclosed the grounds. Memories of all the fun which they had enjoyed in the past six years passed through her mind. There had been picnics and dances, beach parties and tennis games. She hugged her knees, rocking back and forth anxiously.
“What’s eating you, Kit?” asked Jean, mildly. Jean was the first to have an emotional storm over the inevitable, but once it was over, she always settled down to make the best of things, while Kit was gloomy and raged inwardly for days.
“Wonder what we’ll really find to do there all the time. I don’t want to be a merry milkmaid, do you?”
“If it would help Dad and Mother, yes.”
“But definitely. You don’t have a monopoly on the desire to help, you know. We’d all walk from here to Elmhurst on our left ears if it would help Dad and Mother, but the fact that we’d do it wouldn’t make it any easier, would it?”
“Don’t be a dope, Kit,” said Tommy.