"I am good, Jake," said Gretta, as keenly alive now as any other distinguished stranger, to the dialect of her native village.
"Miss Bradbury isn't ill, is she? She's able to be out?" asked Happie, rightly construing Jake's feminine pronoun to apply to her godmother.
"I guess," said Jake. "But she was afraid she might wetten her feet out, so she said she guessed she hadn't ought to went. Rosie wouldn't leave her go, for all; she wanted to come along bad, but she said she'd have to let the meetin' you folks to me."
"And she couldn't have 'let' it to a better man, Jake," said Bob gravely.
The drive up to the Ark could not have been more beautiful if Crestville had felt precisely as the young Scollards felt, and had wanted to show Robert Gaston the country under its most attractive aspect. A light, but wet snow which had not reached New York, had fallen here on the preceding day. It was the sort of snow that rests on the bare tree branches and clothes them in white. The entire landscape was a study in black and white, trees all white on a line of black limb, serried ranks of black woods touched with white in the distance, white fields, black rocks, all against a gray sky that had the effect of nearness and of palpable softness.
"Dear me, it is a lovely country!" Robert said, looking about him delightedly. "What a glorious view! No wonder Gretta is glad to get back!"
"It was the dreariest, most desolate place to us when we came here last April that one could imagine. The house dilapidated, unfurnished, or furnished with rickety fragments, and mother so ill, and our future so unsmiling! Aunt Keren was everything to us; she literally saved mother's life, we think, but indeed it was discouraging enough the night we drove this road for the first time," said Margery. "There is our Ark!"
Mahlon let Don Dolor turn in at the gate. The big sled was not far behind, speed being nearly equal up hill between tired horses and a fresh one.
Miss Keren risked taking cold, standing on the upper step to beam her welcome. Beside her stood Rosie Gruber, as tall and gaunt as ever, but now her gauntness had the effect of an original design, and when the Ark had first known her Rosie had given the impression of being gaunt from over-work and under-feeding.
She caught Polly and Penny into her arms, both at once, like a capacious threshing machine grasping at peculiarly succulent little grains.