Families -- Fiction; Girls -- Conduct of life -- Fiction; Young women -- Conduct of life -- Fiction
"I should really like to know how you knew," he observed, as if
wondering. "Perhaps it is not worth while going there. But I want to
see it again, if you don't."
"Oh, I do. I am very much interested, and you know you are to tell me
what you are planning."
"Yes," he replied. "I meant to tell you. That was what I brought you
for. But I thought you would be surprised and I hoped that you might
be pleased."
"Trust me for that, Fox, if your plans are what I hope they are. If
they are, I shall be very happy."
They stopped in the road before the square house that was painted
cream color. Fox gazed at it longingly. It seemed to be saying, "Come
in! Come in!" and reaching out arms to him. There was the old well at
one side, with its great sweep. The ground about the well was bare of
snow and there was a path from it to the kitchen door. Thin curls of
smoke were coming lazily from each of the great chimneys.
He sighed, at last, and turned to Mrs. Ladue. "I should like to live
there," he said.
"You would find it rather a hardship, I am afraid," she returned,
watching him closely, "depending upon that well, picturesque as it
is."
He laughed. "Easy enough to lay pipes from the hotel, back there." He
nodded in the direction of the larger house, the one of the
twenty-five Guernseys and the model barn. "They have a large supply
and a power pump. Ask me something harder."
"The heating," she ventured. "Fires--open fires--are very nice and
necessary. But they wouldn't be sufficient."
He laughed again. "It is not impossible to put in a heating-system.
One might even run steam pipes along with the water pipes and heat
from their boilers. I press the button, they do the rest."
"Well, I can't seem to think of any other objection. And there is a
very good view."
"A very good view," he repeated. He was silent for a while. "I have
done very well in the past five or six years," he said then, "and the
wish that has been growing--my dearest wish, if you like--has been to
establish a sort of private hospital about here somewhere. It wouldn't
be a hospital, exactly; anyway, my patients might not like the word.
And I should hate to call it a sanitarium. Call it Sanderson's
Retreat." He smiled at the words. "That's it. We'll call it
Sanderson's Retreat."
It would have warmed his heart if he could have seen her face; but he
was not looking.
"I am very glad, Fox," she murmured. "That makes me very happy."
"Sanderson's Retreat?" he asked, turning to her. "But I haven't got
it. Just as I thought I had found it I found that I couldn't get it."
"Perhaps that old skinflint who lives there doesn't own it," she
suggested.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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