“Depends on the company,” laughed Perkins again. “So do I. Guess we'll all go together.”
True to her promise, Mandy was ready within half an hour. Cameron shuddered as he beheld the bewildering variety of colour in her attire and the still more bewildering arrangement of hat and hair.
“You're good and gay, Mandy,” said Perkins. “What's the killing?”
Mandy made no reply save by a disdainful flirt of her skirts as she set off down the lane, followed by Perkins, Cameron and Tim bringing up the rear.
The lane was a grassy sward, cut with two wagon-wheel tracks, and with a picturesque snake fence on either side. Beyond the fences lay the fields, some of them with stubble raked clean, the next year's clover showing green above the yellow, some with the grain standing still in the shock, and some with the crop, the late oats for instance, still uncut, but ready for the reaper. The turnip field was splendidly and luxuriantly green with never a sign of the brown earth. The hay meadow, too, was green and purple with the second growth of clover.
So down the lane and between the shorn fields, yellow and green, between the clover fields and the turnips, they walked in silence, for the spell of the Sabbath evening lay upon the sunny fields, barred with the shadows from the trees that grew along the fence lines everywhere. At the “slashing” the wagon ruts faded out and the road narrowed to a single cow path, winding its way between stumps and round log piles, half hidden by a luxuriant growth of foxglove and fireweed and asters, and everywhere the glorious goldenrod. Then through the bars the path led into the woods, a noble remnant of the beech and elm and maple forest from which the farm had been cut some sixty years before. Cool and shadowy they stood, and shot through with bright shafts of gold from the westering sun, full of mysterious silence except for the twittering of the sleepy birds or for the remonstrant call of the sentinel crow from his watch tower on the dead top of a great elm. Deeper into the shade the path ran until in the gloom it faded almost out of sight.
Soothed by the cool shade, Cameron loitered along the path, pausing to learn of Tim the names of plants and trees as he went.
“Ain't yeh never comin'?” called Mandy from the gloom far in front.
“What's all the rush?” replied Tim, impatiently, who loved nothing better than a quiet walk with Cameron through the woods.
“Rush? We'll be late, and I hate walkin' up before the hull crowd. Come on!” cried his sister in impatient tone.