But she sat still, letting the soft June air woo her, and the scents of flower and field hold some subtle communion with her. There was a certain hidden harmony between her and them; and yet they stirred her somehow uneasily.
"I wonder," she said after a few minutes' silence, "what a nobleman's park is like?"
The mother stood still again in the middle of the kitchen.
"A park!"
"Yes. It must be something beautiful; and yet I cannot think how it could be prettier than this."
"Than what?" said her mother impatiently.
"Just all this. All this country; and the hayfields, and the cornfields, and the hills."
"A park!" her mother repeated. "I saw a 'park' once, when I was down to New York; you wouldn't want to see it twice. A homely little mite of a green yard, with a big white house in the middle of it; and homely enough that was too. It might do very well for the city folks; but the land knows I'd be sorry enough to live there. What's putting parks in your head?"
But the daughter did not answer, and the mother stood still and looked at her, with perhaps an inscrutable bit of pride and delight behind her hard features. It never came out.
"Diana, do you calculate to be ready for the sewin' meetin'?"