One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons’ pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. It sounded keenest and sweetest over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.
“It’s the peep frogs,” called Buzzy, coming up from the barn with Buttercup’s creamy contribution to the family. “They’re just waking up. That means it’s spring for sure.”
“Isn’t it cute of them to try to tell us all about it,” Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Tommy come out and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the porch. Once Doris stopped below their father’s window to call up to him.
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Tommy, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging.
Sally paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls and Tommy received their first real information about the other neighbors around Elmhurst.
Buzzy was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Sally at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, poring over a seed catalogue.
“I’d love some zinnias and snapdragons and blue delphiniums in big beds along the terraces,” she said. “Think of the splashes of blue up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies’ place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.”
“You’ll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better,” Sally declared merrily. “We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what’s left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you’ve got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don’t need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl.”
The girls were silent, remembering what Rebecca had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Tommy’s curiosity got the better of his caution and he coaxed Sally away to hunt for the lilies of the valley hidden away under the hazel bushes.
It was Sally, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Sally, who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.