“All of us? At once?” laughed her aunt. “Never, I hope, for your mother’s sake.”
“Well, when will you let the children come? I want them all—first, the three oldest, if you won’t send them all at once, and then Jack and Viva. Still, it would be much better if you let them come with Syd and Gwen and Gladys to look after them,” Jan persisted.
“I hardly see how we can arrange the details of their coming just now,” Mrs. Graham said, smiling at Jan’s earnestness. “You see we are all disposed of for the next five months at the seashore—and I can not cease to regret that you could not have at least one week there with us, for the New England coast is so glorious that you would not feel that you had seen the sea at Manhattan Beach if you could get a glimpse of it tumbling in over those piled-up rocks. However, next summer, I hope, you will. Then after this summer comes school again, and Sydney will enter college if he keeps up his present pace.” And his mother smiled proudly at the handsome boy for whom in her secret heart there was an especial soft spot. “I think the most probable thing is that you will return to us. It would be very nice if you could come back in the fall, and if in the summer your mother and one or two of the younger children could join us. I don’t see much prospect of any of us going West, Janet, for after Gwen and Gladys are a little further on in their studies they must go to Europe to learn to see art properly, and to learn something of other peoples than their own. But we can not plan; we might be able to make a flying trip with the older children to the Yellowstone, and stop at Crescendo. There’s no way of being sure of the future, impatient Miss Lochinvar! If you girls are going to call on the Misses Larned and Dorothy and Cena before luncheon you would better be about it, for we must lunch at quarter after twelve to-day. There is the transfer-wagon at the door, and I hear the man bringing down your trunk, Jan.”
Gwen and Gladys mournfully accompanied Jan on her farewell visit to her teachers, who parted from her with a glimmer of genuine regret showing through their elaborate expressions of their sense of loss.
“It has been a great pleasure to teach you, Miss Howe,” said Miss Larned. “You are faithful to your tasks, docile, and amiable. I trust that the autumn will bring you back to us.”
“We wouldn’t be able to bear letting her go if we thought it wouldn’t, Miss Larned,” said Gwen.
Dorothy Schuyler and Cena North clung to Jan in precisely the same manner, though both assured her that they should be at the station to see her off. Jan only wrenched herself away by dwelling on that fact, and by promises to write very, very often.
Sydney met the three distressed girls at the door, as they returned to luncheon. “Hallo, bluing-bags!” he cheerfully saluted. “They won’t have to begin watering Fifth Avenue for two or three days yet, will they?”
“It wouldn’t be so bad to let you go if I could use my eyes to write you often,” said Gwen, as they mounted the stairs. “But when I think how lonely I’ll be, and how I can’t write, probably more than two or three times a week, I can not see how I shall get on.”
“I’ll write you, and we’ll send that daily journal, and you’ll have Gladys,” said Jan cheerily.