"Literally, if you mean the sticking," smiled her mother.
Laura, standing with her face pressed against the steaming glass of the window pane, sighed heavily. Mrs. Scollard turned and crossing over to her side, looked for a moment out upon the reeking scene. The rain poured down in torrents, swept sidewise across the fields by the roaring wind. The ground looked black at a little distance, the trees bent their bare boughs to the storm's fury; not a sound, not a human being lightened the desolation of the outlook.
The lonely woman felt her heart tighten under the grip of a fresh tide of homesickness. Miss Bradbury had been trying of late to encourage her by hinting that if she were not perfectly restored to health in the autumn, she could spend the winter in the Ark, so at the worst there was no reason for anxiety. But what a life to lead, to condemn her clever children to! How could she bear it? Then the courage that made her all that she was, the courage that Happie had inherited, rose to answer her own question. She could bear it because she must bear it; she would fight for her health, and be able once more to work and to live for her children.
"When this storm has spent itself," she said brightly, "we shall see the spring fairly leaping forward in all its loveliness. This is a sort of aftermath of all winter's fury. It can't last long with such a wind as this raging, and when it passes you girls will find arbutus and hepatica, anemones, and very soon violets. It is going to be a wonderful country for flowers, for all sorts of beauty. I think we shall hear song birds in Crestville that we never heard before, and fancy what it will be to hunt for wild flowers at the foot of those glorious mountains! I think there could hardly be a more splendid view than ours."
Happie crept up and peeped slyly over her mother's shoulder. She saw a moisture on the long lashes that belied the blithe tone and the enthusiasm.
"It's just a trifle dim now, motherums," was all that Happie said, but the tone in which she said it made the words what they were meant to be—the salute of a good soldier to the courage of his superior officer.
"Oh, by and by will be a sweeter by and by, of course," Margery chimed in. "I suppose we shall all feel better when it clears up."
The dinner that day did not promise to be precisely a success. Polly and Penny had risen superior to the weather in such a game of romps that the baby appeared upon the scene decidedly cross. Bob came in wet through and exhausted from a tussle with the barn door which had to be rehung upon its broken hinges to protect the books still lying in their packing cases, stored in the rickety building. He found it impossible to talk; his muscles ached, he had pounded his thumb black and blue in his efforts at carpentering, and creeping chills, the result of his wetting, chased one another down his spine.
All that Happie had said of the preponderance of eggs in their limited bill of fare was strictly true. It was hard to consider a dinner satisfactory when its main dish was scrambled eggs, after one had had boiled eggs for breakfast, and was looking forward to fried eggs for supper. Dishes too had to be washed as they went along, for the supply of kitchen utensils was low until the mistress of the house should return with reinforcements.
"When we were in New York we turned a faucet, and took it for granted that hot water in the sink was a natural institution, like a hot spring. Now that we have to heat every drop we begin to realize it was a sort of phenomenon," sighed Margery, lifting the teakettle to the forward hole of the stove, and signaling Bob to put in another stick of wood before she set it down.