"I'm ready," said Happie, wrenching herself from the contemplation of the portraits on a poster of some incredibly corpulent hens and pigs, professing to have been nourished by a powder which the poster advertised.
"Wait here and I'll bring the horse to the steps," said Gretta, going with indifference between Don Dolor, the café au lait mule and the spatterwork horse.
Happie jumped into the buggy, smiling with pleasure. There was something cozy about a trip to the village store, doing everything for oneself, and watching life at close range. She had completely forgotten the original errand on which she had come.
Don Dolor trotted along briskly, head up and his black flanks shining in a way that reflected credit on Bob's amateur grooming, for they shone enough to reflect anything else as well as credit.
"I'll read my letters if you don't mind, Gretta," said Happie. She had fallen into the habit of reading the girls' letters to this lonely girl at her side. Happie's friends belonged to the world into which her father and mother were born, a world of wealth and pleasure, and their letters gave Gretta insight into lives very different from her own, into which they brought new personal interests. She had grown to know Happie's friends through this introduction. Happie now read pages of merry-making at the seashore, whither Edith had gone early; of still gayer doings in New York, where Elsie Barker lingered, going to roof gardens and summer operas to her lively heart's content, and of the most delightful times of all which Eleanor Vernon was having traveling up the Hudson to Niagara, the St. Lawrence, Montreal and Quebec.
Happie drew a long breath as she laid down this last letter. "That's the trip I most want to take on this side the ocean," she said soberly.
Gretta looked at her anxiously. She was more than desirous that Happie should not miss her old friends, nor long for the pleasures of town, and her chief earthly hope just now was that Happie might become too attached to Crestville to be willing to go back.
"I don't see how you stand it," she said, with the deep design of hearing what Happie would reply. "Don't you wish that one of the fairies you were reading me about would fly down and offer you the chance to get away from here, and have the kind of good times your friends are having?"
"It might frighten Don Dolor; I think from his appearance when he came that he isn't used to good fairies," laughed Happie. Then the smile faded and she looked gravely up the road ahead of her. It ascended steeply, and as they followed it the mountains began to come in sight over the hill crest. All along the way the huckleberries were in bloom, and the sheep laurel touched grayness of rocks, and brownness of ill-nourished brambles into brightness with its purpling pink.
Up the rough roads which opened at intervals through the woods on either side of the main road, one saw masses of pink and white beauty, announcing the perfection of the mountain laurel growing and blossoming aside from the thoroughfares. And the rhododendron buds of the previous autumn were swelling and showing pink along their cone-like edges, under the light brown of their sticky outer covering. Soon the roadside would be glorified by their splendor. Cleared fields made patches of vivid green against the serried trunks of the trees in the woods, and the breeze blew down, pure and vivifying from the mountains.