“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side, looking for all the world like a meditative brown thrush. “I can’t seem to get that queer silver-gray effect. You take a day like this, just before a rain, and it seems to underlie everything. I’ve tried dark green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.”
“Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father, closing one eye to look at her painting. “It’s the old master’s trick. You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you the atmospheric gray quality in everything. Here come Ralph and Sally.”
Sally waved her hand, but joined Kit, Doris and Billie in the lower garden at their grubbing for cutworms.
“If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll help a lot,” she told them.
“Oh, we’ve salted them. We each took a bag of salt and went out sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly believe it was a tonic to the cutworm colony. The only thing to do, is go after them and annihilate them.”
Ralph nodded to the group on the terrace, but went on up to the orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in her usual impulsive fashion.
“Do you suppose he’s come here with the idea of taking Jean away? Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d like to tell him she’s not for him. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw her across his saddle and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much mistaken.”
Sally glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in her slow, deliberate fashion. “I’m sure I don’t know, but Ralph said he was coming back here every spring, so he can’t expect to take her away this year.”
Ralph threw himself down in the grass beside Jean. She smiled at him, then bent over her board, absently touching in some shadows on the trunks of the trees. Her thoughts had wandered from the old orchard, as they did so often these days. It was the future that seemed more real to her, with its hopes and ambitions, than the present.