A girlish head, "running over with curls," lifted itself from the long orchard grass, and listened—the slender, arched black brows met over the bright, dark eyes in a vexed frown.
The woman who was calling Jaquelina in that loud, shrill, uncultivated voice stood in the doorway of a low, unpainted farm-house, prettily situated on the gentle slope of a green hill at whose foot a silvery little brook ran singing past.
Beyond it was a strip of fertile meadow. Then the ground took a sloping rise again into the orchard now glowing white and red in the flush of its spring-time blossoming.
Under the branches of a wide-spreading apple tree a girl lay at length in the emerald grass and blossoming clover, her curly head bent over a book.
The sunshine sifted down through the fragrant boughs on the soft chestnut locks with a glint of gold in their brownness, and on the arch, pretty face with its soft skin tanned to a clear brune by exposure, and the pouting lips that were tinted with the vivid scarlet of youth and bounding vitality.
"Jack-we-li-ner!" came the loud, elongated scream again.
Jaquelina Meredith sprang up so impatiently that her head struck against a low-bending branch, and a shower of the fragrant apple-blossoms fluttered down into the folds of her faded print dress.
A robin that had been singing in the tree broke off in his warble and stared down at her in round-eyed surprise.
"What now, I wonder?" she said, as she took up her book and her sun-bonnet, and wended her way to the house.
"Hurry up, will you now, Lina?" cried the woman in the doorway, as she crossed the log over the little brook. "You must come in the house and tend the baby while I hasten the dinner a bit. Your uncle wants to go over to the Grange meeting directly."