Happie sprang up to greet the dawn and to look out at her mountains—already it gave her a thrill of pleasure to feel that they were her mountains.
She awakened her sister with her cry of delight, Surely it was going to be worth suffering much discomfort and deprivation to waken every morning to such beauty as this. And when one remembered that the beauty was to restore their mother, what did exile and more or less furniture matter?
More beautiful than when clad in verdure the trees stood outlined against the eastern sky, their perfect symmetry of line and limb thrown into relief by the sunrise glow. Mists tinged with every exquisite tint of color flowed around the mountainsides like the soft draperies of Aurora. Quietly brown at her feet lay the waiting fields, except where the rye of autumn's sowing was beginning to hint of coming green. Pines and firs stood black against the sky, while the faintest tone of red showed to a keen eye that the maple buds were forming and the fresh sap running.
The glad bird chorus of later spring was wanting, but the blithe, brave bluebird uttered his cheering note, liquid as the brooks which taught it to him, and the robin defied possible frosts with his clarion whistle, sounds the more delightful that they were the only spring anthems yet audible.
Laura and Polly fluttered into the room as they heard Happie's exclamation. Happie turned towards them with a shining face.
"Oh, girls, oh, Margery, isn't it heavenly?" she cried in an ecstasy. "Really we must be happy here no matter how we hate it!"
A remark which her sisters hailed with such a shout of laughter that it cheered their mother's waking across the hall.
"The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him," said Margery softly. "I never before realized what that meant."
Even Laura scrambled into her clothes with considerable cheerfulness after this auspicious beginning of the beginning, and the four girls got down-stairs in good time and in good spirits.
But alas! for the weakness of human nature and the brief duration of its exalted moods! When they began to grapple with the problem of getting breakfast, and of persuading the stove to burn the wood which Bob had piled ready to hand the night before, as if he had long been a country boy used to gathering fuel, the benediction of the dawn began to lose effect.