"You won't do anything of the kind," returned Marion. "You young gentlemen will please vacate the room immediately and let me get up and get ready for tea, and then you may return and attend me to the festive board if you like. I mean to go to supper."
"How nice Marion is nowadays!" said Rob to Bram in the hall. "She isn't a bit as she was when she first came here. Do you think it was falling into the old hemlock that did it?"
"Did it? Did what, Rob Roy?"
"Made her so nice."
"Well, no, not altogether that. Suppose you try it on the one Jem cut down yesterday."
"But that is not down a bank, as Marion's was," objected Rob, whose literal way of taking everything was a continual source of good-natured amusement to his brothers and cousins. "Do you really think it was that, Bram?"
"No, Robin, I don't think the fall had very much to do with it," answered Bram, more seriously. "I think Marion sees now that she was wrong in some things, and so she is trying to do better. Perhaps her accident helped by giving her time to think."
"It is very nice, her being so good-natured and having her room to whittle in, and all," observed Rob Roy, after another pause of consideration; "but I wish she could run about again."
Saturday and Monday came and brought the expected guests. Grandfather seemed to Marion's eyes to have grown somewhat older and to stoop a little. He was an object of instant and intense admiration to all the small fry, especially to solemn little Dotty Overbeck, who studied him on all sides, and then went and whispered to his mother:
"May we call him grandfather, mamma?"