The Daughters of the Little Grey House

by Marion Ames Taggart

"So do I," said Rob, taking it out of the oven. "Well, we'll see about your mother, and all the rest of the plan when the time comes. Cousin Charlotte has not even begun to build. I must hurry off, or I shall not be ready when the guests come."

Rob ran out of the room, Lydia's voice pursuing her into the hall. "If she knows she can get Mr. Dennis and me she may hasten; her Annie that she had has gone away, and she would likely build quicker if she knew there was some one she could count on." Lydia called after her, and Rob burst in upon Wythie at her toilette in their bedroom with the surprising news of the past hour.

"Oh, dear," sighed Wythie while she laughed at Rob's account of Lydia's announcement, "how can Cousin Peace want to leave us and how can we let her go? Yet, of course, it is natural that she should cling to that spot where she was born and has always lived, and natural to want her own home. But that dear lean-to domestic chapel will be a sore loss to us! It seems to me that this has been a winter of uneventful events that count for a great deal."

"I suppose that is partly because we are at that age when everything seems significant," said Rob with great astuteness. "It will make a lot of difference to me just now if I can't get ready in time to be down at the station when the train arrives." And she frantically tried to find the button which was, naturally, on the other side of the band of the skirt, which she had put on wrong side out.

"'Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe,'" quoted Wythie mildly as she went to rescue Rob from her plight. "There is time, Robin, if you only wouldn't try to take it all at once."

"Robins are always flustering birds," said Rob emerging, flushed, but grateful, from the skirt which Oswyth had righted. "But you know it would be hard not to be on hand to witness the arrival of the first instalments."

This was "the spring opening," as Rob called it, of "the separate ell" of the little grey house. In other words the Flinders' farm had been made ready, after trying delays, to receive the four crippled children with whom Hester's experiment was to begin, and they were to be brought to Fayre by a delegation from New York on the mid-afternoon train. Dr. Fairbairn had had an inspiration, so natural that every one wondered why it had not been part of the plan from the first: this was to install Mrs. Flinders as housekeeper in her own house. It involved the presence of her paralysed husband, but Polly was to remain with the Greys, an arrangement so much to the child's advantage that her mother gladly agreed to it. So the Flinders were already installed on the farm, which, after much discussion had received the name of Rob's suggesting, and was called Green Pastures.

"There is something so peaceful about it," said Rob, "and when we teach the children the child's own psalm they will take it as referring directly to themselves when they say: 'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.' And if ever the attempt did grow into something important I for one would rather have it spoken of as Green Pastures than as the Hester Home for Incurables, or some such forbidding name—I hate the institutional sound!"

So Green Pastures it was, and a busy time its friends had had making it a real clover pasture for its little guests.

There was not to be a formal opening to which the public was invited; it was too simple and modest an attempt to be inaugurated ceremonially, and the youth of its founders made their elders desire to see its first beneficiaries installed in a way harmonious with that youth and inexperience. But on the other hand it was impossible to let the day go by without some special notice; the plan had grown too important for that. So the Baldwins and Mr. Armstrong were coming out from town, bringing the children; the Rutherfords were coming home for the occasion, and Mrs. Silsby, Aunt Azraella and Miss Charlotte with Mrs. Grey were to have a tea in Mrs. Flinders' former best parlour after the children had been fed and tucked away in the little white enamelled beds provided for them.