“Oh, but I love to,” Kit replied. “Maybe I’ll be a mountain climber yet. Kids, you don’t grasp that there is something strange and interesting in my own special temperament. The longing to attain, the—the insatiable desire to seize adventure and follow her fleeing footsteps, the longing to tap the stars on their foreheads and let them know I’m here.”
Ralph laughed at her. “Well, even if I don’t share such desires with you, Kit, how about all of us going for a picnic one of these days. It seems to me that the ground isn’t too wet for one, and it would do us all good to stop worrying about Billie since there is nothing we can do to hasten his recovery. Do you agree, Buzzy?”
“That’s a swell idea, Ralph,” he replied, chewing on a blade of grass. “Why not make it tomorrow. I’ll ask Mom to pack us up some food.”
“No, leave that to us, Buzzy,” Jean interrupted. “We’ve got some steaks in the house that are just asking to be broiled outdoors over a charcoal fire. With those and some fruit and coffee, we should have enough. Let’s plan to leave here around five and make an evening of it.”
“What good times a large family can have,” Ralph said as he slipped his arm through Jean’s on a walk through the garden later. “Sometimes I wish I had been lucky enough to have had brothers and sisters. You feel so odd when you are all the family yourself.”
The next evening Kit, Buzzy, Jean, and Ralph hiked down the river to a small beach that seemed to all of them ideal for a picnic. It was Buzzy who had suggested the spot. He said he and the other boys used to go there a lot in the summer to fish and swim. While the boys built the fire, Kit and Jean walked on down the river a little way.
Not far off, the girls found some violets and picked some to take home. Looking across the river, Jean saw an old house nestled among the trees. “Who lives there, do you know, Kit? I never saw it before.”
“It’s Cynthy Allen’s place. People say she’s queer, but I don’t think so. She’s real old, over seventy. But she thinks she is only about seventeen, and she’s always doing flighty things. She’s lived out in the woods ever since she ran away from her family years ago. Once she started to make doughnuts and they found her hanging them on nails all over the kitchen. So people have been afraid of her ever since. Isn’t that silly?”
“Let’s go over to see her some day. Want to?”
“Sure. I’ll bet she gets lonely there, all by herself. Say, we’d better start back. That fire ought to be started by now.”