"Oh, well, mamma," spoke the father's genial voice, when they had settled back in their seats, "it will be only bats and hornets that will dispute your property with you, at all events. Humanity is too scarce hereabouts to trouble you. No house in sight except those distant chimneys, is there?"
"Yes, there is one, papa," replied the youngest, quickly; "it is behind the trees, under that hill; but I shouldn't have noticed it only that I saw a little girl in a pink dress moving about there."
"Come, now, Pussy; maybe you'll find a nice friend in little Pink—'a companion of my solitude,' eh?" suggested her father, carelessly. But Laura rather sniffed, and made a mournful remark about "Florence, Ethel, and the rest of the girls at the beach."
At that moment "little Pink" was sitting on the door-step of that same house "behind the trees, under the hill," and gazing up, full of excitement, toward the newly opened house on the knoll above her.
It was a great event, and great events happened very rarely to Pink. Once since she could remember she had been with her father and mother to pay a visit in the family of an aunt. They had taken the old horse and the green-bodied wagon, and had been a whole day in reaching their destination. Two or three times during every summer, also, they made a similar pilgrimage to attend the church where Pink's mother used to go when she was a girl and lived at "the village." Another great event was the shopping excursion that had to be made every season. While the father bought on one side of the store his seeds, or his new plough, or his axe-helve, the mother, on the other side, selected her calico, groceries, and even the ribbon that was to retrim last year's bonnet.
Pink's calico, chosen by herself this time, had been bought on the last of these expeditions. "I wouldn't say a word," she had pleaded, "if it cost any more than the brown, but they don't charge for the color, so mayn't I have the pink, please?"
And the pink calico had been bought, made, and worn to grace that other great event, the "examination day." For Pink, with a handful more of scholars, who lived about as far from the scorched-up little school-house as she did, walked her mile and a half every day during term-time, and wrestled with Webster's spelling-book, and Colburn's arithmetic, compositions, and "pieces," until the final grand display of the closing half-day. That was brass band and military procession to Pink. She held her head high, and went through her part with beating heart but machine-like precision. To have missed would have been unendurable mortification and misery.
But now all Pink's interest was centred in the changes that were taking place in the handsome old place adjoining her father's farm. The tall, gloomy fence in front was taken down, and the broad greensward, sloping to the road, carefully mowed. Where boughs were too dense they were pruned away. A gay striped awning appeared over the front door. Most interesting of all, some one was always to be seen moving about. It might be the motherly lady with gray hair and soft white lace upon it; it might be girls of different sizes, in dresses wonderful to Pink's country eyes; it might be only a workman making a flower bed. Altogether, Pink had never known so much excitement in her life as this.
Laura and her sisters used to notice how continually, when they were looking from their airy windows on the hill-top, the same rosy dot was to be seen, now flitting about, now resting quietly, and they often spoke of "little Pink," as they called her.
She took her piece of sewing as usual one morning out on the shady door-step, whence she could watch the great house. She saw Laura come listlessly out of the door and stroll off, as if she cared little where she went. Laura was "sick of everything," she had been declaring—sick of the country, sick of croquet, sick of all her books and trinkets. Her mother had reproved rather gravely the little girl's fretful discontent, and Laura, in no happy frame of mind, had chosen to roam off by herself.