“Where has he gone?” asked Jane absently, and they both laughed. “You can’t expect me to remember such a little thing as Mark’s going when our mother is coming,” Jane added. “He’ll be here every spare minute, anyway.”
For two weeks Hollyhock House spun out of all likeness to its calm self. The New York dealer had furnished a paper for the south bedroom that differed only in a small detail from the sample which Jane had mailed him. Paper hangers, painters, and upholsterers worked steadily to restore the room to the appearance it had worn eighteen years before. The odour of paint dominated the early June odours, which crept in from the garden, and the bustle, untidiness, and confusion of workmen in the house left little time or thought for the loveliness which, this year, as in all years, the beautiful garden offered its young owners.
But at last the south chamber was done. It shone in the whiteness of its new paint, and blossomed, a rival to the garden, in its new wall paper, with apple blossoms rioting everywhere between its floor and ceiling. The low rocker in which, seventeen years ago, the girl mother had stilled her first baby, Mary, was covered in a chintz of browns and greens and pinks, repeated on the seats of the other chairs. Delicate curtains of point d’esprit fluttered from beneath the same shades in raw silk outer curtains. Mary had worked steadily, and Jane had helped her, to hemstitch new dresser and table covers of the finest linen, not because there was not already a store of such things in the house, but because they were eager to prepare with their own fingers these special belongings for their mother’s room. When everything was done there followed five long-drawn days of waiting. Mr. Moulton had received a cablegram that Mrs. Garden had sailed. She had asked the children not to meet her. Mr. Moulton went alone to New York to be there when she arrived and to bring her home.
Waiting had been hard from the moment that the accomplishment of the work in the house left nothing more to be done, except to wait. After Mr. Moulton had gone it became unbearable.
“Suppose she missed the boat!” said Florimel, wriggling about in her chair on the piazza.
Mary and Jane laughed, but Jane said: “To tell the truth, I can’t help being scared to death for fear there’s been a collision and the ship’s sunk.”
“We’d hear that at once,” said Mary. “What I’ve been thinking is that she might have been taken ill and died on the way over.”
“Well, girls!” remonstrated Win. “I’d never have believed you’d have been breaking your necks to cross a bridge you hadn’t come to like this! It isn’t like you to imagine such catastrophes.”
“We never had a mother coming home before,” Florimel reminded him. “We never had a mother anywhere,” added Jane. “It doesn’t seem possible we can have one.”
“If she doesn’t get in to-morrow, the ship will be overdue; to-morrow’s the latest date for her. When ships are overdue, there’s always something wrong, isn’t there, Win?” asked Mary apprehensively.