“What?” Kit’s face was eager with interest.
“Said he had seven cats he kept specially to keep him warm. Said the Judge wouldn’t let him have any fire, so he trained the cats to cuddle around him and keep him warm. So long. I’ll tell Sally you want her to go along with you.”
Kit sat out on the terrace after he had passed up the hill road. Jean and Doris were upstairs with their father, and Tommy was out in the barn somewhere. Her mother was playing the piano. Buzzy had been gone about fifteen minutes when Kit heard the sound of a car coming along the level valley road. It couldn’t be anyone for here, she thought. But just then the car turned in at the wide drive entrance and came up to the porch steps.
“You had better wait,” she heard a voice say, such a nice voice, young and alive-sounding. Then somebody bounded up the steps, three at a time, and crossed the porch, with her sitting right there on the top terrace below the rose and honeysuckle vines. Kit always jumped to conclusions and now she decided for some crazy reason that this was Ralph McRae, from Saskatoon.
There was no doorbell or even a knocker, and the double doors stood wide open, but the screen doors were locked inside, so Kit stood up and called.
“Just a minute, please. I’m coming.”
He waited for her, hat in hand and smiling. It was shadowy, but she saw his face and liked it. He was young and handsome.
“Are you Miss Craig?” he asked, and Kit flushed at the tone. As if she didn’t long seventeen hundred times a month to be the Miss Craig like Jean.
“No. I’m only Kit,” she answered. “You’re our Mr. McRae, I think. Hello.”
He shook hands with her and Kit led him around to the side door and let him in while she lighted a lamp.