"I think I never saw the place look so nice," she said to her step-mother.
Dottie came walking unsteadily over the thick grass. She had found an ox-daisy and a four-o'clock.
"Here! take my pretties," she said imperiously.
Sophia took them.
"They's to be blowed," said Dottie, not yet distinguishing duly the different uses of flowers or of words.
Sophia obediently blew, and the down of the four-o'clock was scattered into space; but the daisy, impervious to the blast, remained in the slender hand that held it. Dottie looked at it with indignation.
"Blow again!" was her mandate, and Sophia, to please her, plucked the white petals one by one, so that they might be scattered. It was not wonderful that, as she did so, the foolish old charm of her school-days should say itself over in her mind, and the lot fell upon "He loves me." "Who, I wonder?" thought Sophia, lightly fanciful; and she did not care to think of the wealthy suitor she had cast aside. Her mind glanced to Robert Trenholme. "No," she thought, "he loves me not." She meditated on him a little. Such thoughts, however transient, in a woman of twenty-eight, are different from the same thoughts when they come to her at eighteen. If she be good, they are deeper, as the river is deeper than the rivulet; better, as the poem of the poet is better than the songs of his youth. Then for some reason—the mischief of idleness, perhaps—Sophia thought of Trenholme's young brother—how he had looked when he spoke to her over the fence. She rose to move away from such silly thoughts.
Dottie possessed herself of two fingers and pulled hard toward the river. Dearly did she love the river-side, and mamma, who was very cruel, would not allow her to go there without a grown-up companion.
When she and her big sister reached the river they differed as to the next step, Dottie desiring to go on into the water, and Sophia deeming it expedient to go back over the field. As each was in an indolent mood, they both gave way a little and split the difference by wandering along the waterside, conversing softly about many things—as to how long it would take the seed of the four-o'clock to "sail away, away, over the river," and why a nice brown frog that they came across was not getting ready for bed like the birdies. There is no such sweet distraction as an excursion into Children's Land, and Sophia wandered quite away with this talkative baby, until she found herself suddenly cast out of Dottie's magic province as she stood beyond the trees that edged the first field not far from the fence of the Harmon garden. And that which had broken the spell was the appearance of Alec Trenholme. He came right up to her, as if he had something of importance to say, but either shyness or a difficulty in introducing his subject made him hesitate. Something in his look caused her to ask lightly:
"Have you seen a ghost?"