"Nonsense, Charlotte! I shall save money. My summers cost me not less than three hundred dollars always, junketing around from hotel to hotel, from the seashore to the mountains. We won't spend three hundred dollars up there, not all of us put together, if I know anything about an isolated farm. And I really ought to look after my property. What do I get out of the sort of summers I usually spend? Weariness and vexation of spirit! Dress three times a day, not a solitary spot that isn't humming with summer voices! When I want to sit down and hear the waves, or to read, I have to hear a lot of empty-headed women telling one another about their servants' misdeeds, or how the tailor spoiled a coat, or—worst of all—how seriously they doubt the wisdom of speaking to some of the other women, one of whom is too quiet to be a desirable acquaintance, and the other too gay to know! And all the long golden summer days they sit on the piazza and make hideous, useless things out of pretty materials! It is nothing to regret that I may spend one summer on my own probably worthless estate, in dignified seclusion. Whether or not, we are going. I did not come to consult you, but to announce it. So go to sleep. For half a year you are to have a vacation where, at the worst, you will be two thousand feet above tide water, and must get strong, knowing the children are safe, and you are secure, breathing good air, even if there is little else to live on. Go to sleep, Charlotte, and stop worrying, because I want you to get strong enough to go at once. Since I have remembered my farm, I am all youthful impatience to see it."
Good Miss Keren-happuch arose with a jerk, intending to stalk out of the room, but Mrs. Scollard sprang up and caught her around the neck. "You dear, you dear! I can't thank you!" she sobbed.
"I don't remember suggesting that you should," said Miss Keren gruffly. But the kiss with which she laid her old friend's daughter back upon the pillow was very tender.
Mrs. Gordon was delighted with the opportunity to take the Patty-Pans and its furniture; it fitted her plans to obtain it quite as well as it worked for the Scollards to have her assume it. Before any one had time to realize what had happened, energetic Miss Bradbury had set Margery and Happie at their preparations for departure, and going away had become a definite fact.
It seemed a little formidable to the three eldest children, now that the plan had taken on definiteness. Mrs. Scollard was about again, proving that if one can find the way to minister to a mind diseased, strength attends on such ministration, but she was still so weak and pale that Margery could hardly look at her without tears. She tried hard to be brave, but she dreaded leaving behind her the only life that she had known, to go away into an untried life among new surroundings.
More than any of the other children, Happie had a cat-like love of place, and to her it was very hard to go away from New York with uncertainty in her mind as to how or when she could return to it.
"I suppose I shall go around wailing and gnashing my teeth, Bob," she confided to her brother. But Bob knew her, and her ability to make the best of something that was not merely a bad bargain, but no bargain at all.
"Not you, Hapsie!" he said. "You will find a dozen good reasons for preferring that farm to any other spot on earth, no matter if it turns out as bad as Martin Chuzzlewit's Eden."
"That's not a bad testimony to the fitness of your nickname, Happie," smiled Margery.