"I shall consider myself engaged for the final act. If I'm going down to Shale's, I must take a sort of lunch counter breakfast and start. And I'm going to get Gretta to 'go along,' as they say here. I'll go talk to Aunt Keren and find out if she wants me to go."
Bob went off whistling "The stormy winds do blow, blow, blow," and Happie ran to meet Margery, whom she did treat, as Ralph said, "as if she were damaged and liable to drop into nothing before her eyes."
Bob, Gretta and Don Dolor broke their way through the heavy snow, not yet drifted, and fetched back Jake Shale's Aaron, with the blue sled and the Kuntz horses, to take the Archaics to the station. Already the wind was lightly stirring; by afternoon there would be impassable drifts, very possibly, between the Ark and the station.
Rosie bade them all a gruff good-bye, but it was not a dismal one, for in a little more than two months, in May, the Scollards would come back, all of them as they supposed, not knowing what changes were awaiting them.
Mahlon swung his arm and leg together in his usual feeble-minded fashion, but the boys chose to construe it this time as a farewell.
"Yes, ta-ta, Mahlon. Good-bye! Shake a day-day back again to Mahlon, Penny!" said Ralph with his solemn face unsmiling as he waved his hand to Mahlon, a salute that Rosie took to herself and returned with a waving apron.
In the train the party no longer divided evenly, augmented as it was by Miss Bradbury. Gretta joined her, after glancing around and seeing that Bob had dropped into a seat with Happie, at a little distance from any of the others. Happie wondered if she imagined Gretta's face fell ever so slightly as she saw that her companion of the journey up had failed her. Sometimes Happie fancied that Gretta liked to be with Bob as well as she liked to be with Happie herself. She wondered if at some future day when handsome Gretta had grown into a splendid and well-educated woman, Bob might—she shook herself mentally. "Just now she is fifteen! This is what comes of Margery's getting herself engaged so young. I am beginning to be silly about all of us—the others." Happie quickly corrected this slip in the thoughts she was thinking. Perhaps Ralph's slender gold bangle of Christmas came down over her hand at that moment to remind her to except herself from her dreams of the future.
"Now then, Hapsie, let her go! What is this that you want to tell me?" asked Bob, bringing her to the immediate present.
"Aunt Keren called me into her room last night," began Happie. "Bob, she said a good deal that I don't know how to repeat. She told me in the Patty-Pans, some three or four weeks ago, why she cares for us as she does. We are her children, because—it is a dear story, and I'd like to tell it to you nicely, but you can't in a car! She met our grandfather before grandma did, and she thought he was going to care for her, but grandma came, and it was she he loved. And the two girls each cared most for the other to be happy. But it was grandma who married, and dear auntie who didn't. They were devoted friends always, you know. Aunt Keren feels as though mother were her very own, because she was not only her two dear friends' child, but if grandpa had cared most for auntie she would have been auntie's daughter, not grandma's. So, she says, we are her nearest of kin. She wants to adopt me legally, so that there will be no chance of some very horrid nieces breaking her will when she leaves me nearly all her money, by and by. I never told you about those nieces calling and being perfectly outrageous up at the Patty-Pans. I didn't tell even mother. Aunt Keren wants me to have most of her money when she dies. And she wants us to give up the Patty-Pans, and let her take a house somewhere, and come to live with her. We are to come up to Crestville for the summer, and in the autumn she wants us to begin this new plan. Of course I was not to decide it, we shall all have to talk it over together, and it will be as mother says, but that is Aunt Keren's desire. It took my breath away."
"I should rather say so!" exclaimed Bob with a low whistle. "Why, Hap, I never heard such a story, so full of several surprises! you to be legally adopted? And to be an heiress? Has Aunt Keren much money? We all thought her poor."