"I'll just run down to the barn and give Chula a lump of sugar and feed
Solomon the first thing," Blue Bonnet said as she turned from the
telephone.
"Have you made your room tidy?" Miss Clyde inquired, coming out in to
the hall at that moment.
"Oh, dear, history repeats itself, doesn't it, Aunt Lucinda?" Blue
Bonnet's good-natured laugh was contagious. Miss Clyde smiled in spite
of herself.
"I haven't made my bed yet, Aunt Lucinda, if that's what you mean. I
hate making it up warm--it's not sanitary, is it? You've said so
yourself, often."
Miss Clyde's smile deepened. Blue Bonnet's sudden conversion to the laws
of hygiene was too amusing.
"I fancy two hours of this autumn air will have restored its freshness,"
she said. "Have you finished your unpacking?"
Blue Bonnet recalled the piles of fluffy whiteness that covered chairs
and window-seat, and, turning, went up-stairs quickly.
It took some time to get the room in proper order. It might, not have
taken so long if the view from the south window had not been so
pleasant. Out in the garden the dahlias and coreopsis nodded and
beckoned coaxingly, the soft wind stirred the leaves in the apple-trees,
and Solomon frisked and rolled with glee in the sunshine.
At last it was finished, at least the furniture had been relieved of its
burdens, and the bed made in the most approved fashion. Blue Bonnet was
free to join Solomon, and to gather a great bunch of the golden-hued
coreopsis to adorn the lunch table. She was thinking of a little plan,
as she cut the long stems and arranged the flowers with taste and
precision; a little plan she had barely time to execute before Kitty
Clark's familiar, "Ooh-hoo, Ooh-hoo!" echoed from somewhere in the
vicinity of the front gate.
"I suppose I'm loads too early, but I could hardly wait to see you, Blue
Bonnet," was her cheery greeting. "We've all been pining away for you.
New York must have been fascinating to have kept you so long."
Blue Bonnet admitted that it was. She even opened her lips to tell of
some of its enchantments, but Kitty went on irrelevantly:
"You've missed a heap at school. I suppose you can catch up, but you'll
have to dig in, I can tell you. The Czar"--Kitty's name for Mr.
Hunt--"isn't bestowing any more favors than usual."
Blue Bonnet's first impulse was to tell Kitty that she would not be back
in school with the We Are Sevens this year, but she thought better of it
and waited.
Kitty rambled on.
"Latin's a perfect fright and--oh, Blue Bonnet, what, do you think? Miss
Rankin's engaged! Yes, she is, honest, truly. She's got a ring, a
beauty! She wore it turned in the first two weeks, but now she's picked
up courage and turned it round so everybody can see it. She's going to
quit after Christmas. They're going to live in Boston. He's a
lawyer--Sarah Blake's father knows him, and says he's right nice."
Kitty's patronizing air nettled Blue Bonnet as much as it amused her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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