The sick girl's face flushed. She ran to the lounge, and hid her face in the pillow.
"Oh, Cherry," she cried, looking up a moment later, tearful but smiling, "if mamma were only here, I should be perfectly happy!"
Just then Aunty Rogers came in to call them to supper.
"Well, well," she said, pleasantly, "I can't see what folks dew think so much o' them little May-flowers for. I'm sure my daffies is a great deal handsomer. But then they be sweet-scented, May-flowers be, and I'm glad they're here, seeing you like 'em."
That night the little spray was placed in a vase by Belle's camphor bottle on the table.
"I don't believe I'll want the camphor to-night, Cherry," she said; "the May-flowers'll be all I'll want. If I wake up in the night, I'll smell of them." And, at the risk of anticipating my story a little, I must tell you that the camphor bottle was never put back again.
The next day was a warm and showery one, a hot sun blazing out between the quiet little rains. Cherry did not go up on the hill at all. In fact, young and strong as she was, and soundly as she had slept on Aunty Rogers's plump feather-bed, she was a trifle lame after her unaccustomed exertions of the day before.
"If it's May-flowers you want," said Aunty Rogers, as she looked out at the April weather, "this'll fetch 'em quicker'n anything else, an' there'll be more'n a fortnit of 'em, countin' in them that's back on the hill. They're dretful late."
It was only five o'clock the next morning when Cherry Mullen stepped briskly up the "cold north road." She carried with her two big market-baskets. Aunty Rogers had assured her that if she only looked "long-side o' them clumps o' laurels that's scattered on the west side, across from the old Thayer place," she would find plenty of arbutus after such a day as the one before. So Cherry felt very comfortable in the bright morning, as she marched along, munching a big slice of bread and butter with great zeal.
She went home at ten, and though she had to take one market-basket empty—for she was still a little hasty in her expectations—the other was quite full of such delicate, fragrant, rose-tinted arbutus as grows only, I believe, in Clearpond.