"I wish it could stay yours, and you would let me live with you; it is dreadful to take anything from you when you have given me so much," repeated Gretta, unable yet to take any view of the morning's events except as they affected her friends.
It was impossible, however, not to feel some little thrills of pleasure as the idea of ownership became more familiar.
The snow of that Saturday went off like the mists of a July morning. On Monday the Scollards rejoiced in a premature sleigh-ride, though the drifts made some of the exposed points of the roads nearly impassable. On Tuesday the same roads were running with rivulets of water, and either sleighing or wheeling was nearly impossible.
Gretta's distress at being an heiress went through nearly the same process as the snow. Under the sunshine of Miss Bradbury and the Scollards' unselfish pleasure in her good, she began to brighten. Then she began to take pleasure in the thought that she could actually benefit them and shelter them under her roof, giving as well as receiving. It never occurred to any of them that they should separate, and in that case what did it matter, after all, in whose name the farm stood? It was and still should be, Gretta's home and that of its new inmates. It was a beautiful thing—provided no one else were the worse for it—that by her grandmother's will the old house had fallen to her grandchild, and that now Gretta Engel had a place, a holding in the county, and could take her position among her neighbors, no longer an object of charity. For even Miss Bradbury's, and the Scollards' charity—though it was of the sort meant by the strict meaning of the word—was a burden, lighten it as they would.
Mrs. Scollard was so much better that it was hard not to be quite as well as before she broke down, and to know that she was not equal to assuming the duties of her former clerkship. She talked a great deal with her older children as to their next move. The Ark had been a rest; it had saved her, but obviously they could not live on in dependence forever; there must be some way found to resume their independent existence. Bob could go back at any moment to Mr. Felton, but the five dollars a week at which he must begin would not support six people—even youngsters' sanguine views of practical questions had to admit that fact.
Margery, Happie and Gretta had a plan; they spent hours discussing it, but nobody yet knew what it was. In the meantime Mrs. Scollard cudgeled her brains by day—and by night too, to her own harm—trying to think of some way out of her troubles.
So when Bob drove up from the post-office on a day a little past the middle of November with a letter among her mail from the firm for which she had so long been confidential correspondent, Mrs. Scollard tore it open eagerly, and gave a queer little sob of joy as she laid it down after reading it.
"Oh, dear Miss Keren, do listen to this!" she said. "They ask me to come back if I am at all able, to take charge again of their foreign correspondence. And they say if I am not equal to resuming fully my old duties, at least to come to assume general supervision of that department at a smaller salary, if the work must be divided. They beg me to take my old position at fifty dollars a week, as before, or to take half the work at twenty-five dollars a week, until I am able to do more. Thirteen hundred a year—we can't live on it, but perhaps we could manage? I don't believe I am equal to resuming everything—manage to add to it, I mean?" Mrs. Scollard looked vaguely at her hearers, thinking aloud.
"Now here is where we come in!" cried Happie, starting up in rapture. "We have the best plan, Margery, Gretta and I, but it never seemed to us enough to rely on. But it would help lots; you can't tell how much, till it gets under way. We want to open a tea room, and a circulating library, and we want to make it lovely, somewhere near the drive, or the speedway, or somewhere where people get tired and thirsty, and blown to pieces. We may have to dress up as geishas, because that's the way it's usually done, but we don't want to; it's so silly! The girls never look Japanese."
"Really, Keren-happuch, what are you talking about?" demanded Miss Bradbury.