“Breakfast!” called Mrs. Bert.
“Miss Goodwin,” I announced at that meal, “is going to saw up the dead wood in my orchard this morning.”
“No, she ain’t. The idee!” cried Mrs. Bert. “She’s jest goin’ ter rest up for the next four weeks, an’ grow fat.”
“You are both wrong,” laughed the young lady. “I’m not going to begin on Mr. Upton’s wood pile this morning, but I expect to finish it before I go away.”
“If thet’s how you feel, I got a wood pile,” said Bert.
She refused to come down to Twin Fires with me that morning, so I toiled alone, getting out more of the brush from the orchard–all of the small stuff, in fact, which wasn’t fit to save for fuel. In the afternoon she consented to come. As I looked at her hands and then at mine, I realized how pale she was.
“It’s wrong for anybody to be so pale as that,” I thought, “to have to be so pale as that!”
I was beginning to pity her.
When we reached the farm, I took her around under the kitchen window and showed her my seed beds, where the asters were already growing madly, some other varieties were up, and the weeds were busy, too; but in the present uncertainty of my horticultural knowledge I didn’t dare pull up anything. I hadn’t realized till that moment that half the fun of having a new place is showing it to somebody else and telling how grand it is going to be.
“And where are you going to put these babies when you set them out?” she asked.