"Better for your return, Aunt Keren," said Margery sweetly, but truthfully.
"What about Snigs?" asked Happie.
"At home with his mother," returned Aunt Keren. "But he will come up in the summer, by August, if not before."
"Is Ralph——" Happie began, but stopped herself before she had framed a question that might have been awkward to answer.
Miss Keren-happuch finished it for her. "Going to stay?" she said. "Yes, he is, or at least until something happens to call him home. Mrs. Gordon yielded to my arguments, and consented to lending him to us. I told her we needed him, especially Bob. So I captured him. Curious that I went to get a girl, and brought home a boy, an altogether unforeseen boy."
Jake Shale drove slowly up the hill. The young people talked incessantly, and all together. Miss Bradbury listened in a pleased silence that betrayed itself in her eyes, for her lips were unbending. She saw that already the effect of her transplanting the Scollards showed; they were blossoming out like the season under the warmth of freedom from anxiety.
Miss Bradbury found to her surprise that she herself was glad to get home, and thought of her coming in those terms. Down in the bottom of her staunch old heart, the good woman had not looked forward to a summer in the Ark with less than dread.
The children took Ralph out at once to display to him all the interesting points of Miss Bradbury's estate, leaving its owner to their mother, and to form the acquaintance of Rose Gruber, "the Dove," whose olive branch was waxing greener in the eyes of all the "Archeologists," as Bob called the inmates of the Ark. Though Happie said that she thought they "were more like Architects, for the dictionary said they made, built, planned, contrived, and that was a full description of the Scollards."
"The creek is high," Rosie called after Bob and Happie, as they followed Margery and Ralph out the side door.
"We are going over to it on our way back," Happie answered over her shoulder. "It does seem to me a pity to call a beautiful trout brook 'a crick,' just as if it were a sort of rheumatism! Brooks sound like lovely things, but cricks!" She ended her supplementary remarks to her companions with a tiny shudder.