It was high noon, and very warm, when the faint sound of distant singing announced to Mrs. Grey and Miss Charlotte and to Mrs. Winslow, who had by that time arrived, that the seven were returning. The singing grew louder, clearer, and at last developed into nothing more classic than the darky song, "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?" chosen as appropriate, and rendered with immense expression.
Almost at once the procession came in sight. Prue and Bartlemy ahead, Prue more than ever beautiful under the great boughs of dogwood, which, like the rest, she bore. Oswyth and Basil followed, Wythie's face looking out flushed and glowing with summer warmth and happiness under the great white, blotched, so-called blossoms of the shrub. Rob and Frances divided Bruce between them, making an arbor over his head, holding above it, by an effort, their spoils of the glossy green and dazzling white. All seven were singing at the tops of their fresh voices, and even Aunt Azraella could not resist the charm of this return, but smiled benignantly at them from the window.
"You never saw anyone so changed as Mr. Flinders," remarked Mrs. Grey at luncheon, as she busily served her guests to fresh peas. "Not only does he carry on the place on halves, instead of two-thirds profit—which is really much fairer—but, now that he has started in well-doing, he is going uphill in virtue, Rob says, as if he were on an inverted chute. He is truly grateful to us—to Rob especially—for taking Polly last winter; he and his wife insist that we saved her life, and I am surprised and delighted with the feeling he shows."
"Being disagreeable is like other habits," said Miss Charlotte. "When people once break off and get over the embarrassment of having their pleasant ways noted, it is quite easy to keep on, even to increase them daily. I believe half the cranky people are so just because they fell into the way of it, and feel awkwardly self-conscious when they behave like other people."
"You ought to know, Cousin Peace," said Rob, suggestively, and, before the laugh with which her hint had been received had died away, she pushed her chair back from the table. "Come on, you three big boys and little girls," she cried. "Do you realize that it is now half past one, and that the Baldwins arrive at four? That isn't long in which to decorate the little grey house, make the toilets of its inmates—Kiku-san's ribbon alone needs five minutes to tie—and get a triumphal procession of welcome down to the station to meet them. You can't have another piece of cake, really you cannot have it, Bartlemy—unless you put it in your pocket. Jump up, all of you!"
Rob's younger guests meekly obeyed her, and presently she had them all at work, filling every available vase and jar with water, and bringing them to her—"like Isaac's slaves returning from the well," Bruce said—in the cool pantry where the girls were arranging the dogwood.
It was not long before the little grey house was massed with the woodland beauty—old fireplaces, narrow mantels, every table and corner, all was full of the starry white, brown-blotched radiance of the dogwood.
Rob fell back to admire, leaning an elbow on Wythie and Frances's shoulders, and shutting one eye in exaggeration of Bartlemy's artistic manner of scrutinizing a sketch. "I think it will do, my brethren and sisters," she said, solemnly.
"O little house that gave me birth,
We've laid the dogwood on thy hearth
Because the guests now drawing near
Kept you from going to the dogs, my dear—