“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side, looking for all the world, as Kit would have said, like a meditative brown thrush. “I can’t seem to get that queer silver gray effect. You take a day like this, just before a rain, and it seems to underlie everything. I’ve tried dark green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.” “Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father, closing one eye to look at her painting. “It is the old masters’ trick. You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you the atmospheric gray quality in everything. Hello, here come Ralph and Piney.” Piney waved her hand in salutation, but joined Kit and Helen in the lower garden at their grubbing for cut worms. “If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll help a lot,” she told them. “Oh, we’ve salted them. Shad told us that. We each took a bag of salt and went out sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly believe it was a tonic to the cut worm colony. The only thing to do, is go after them and annihilate them.” Ralph lifted his cap in greeting to the group on the terrace, but went on up to the orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in her usual impulsive fashion. “Do you suppose for one moment that the prince of Saskatoon is coming wooing my fair sister? Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d like to tell him she’s not for him,” she said, emphatically. “Now I believe that I’m a genius, but I have resources. I can do housework, and be the castle maid of all work, and smile and be a genius still, but Jean needs nourishing. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw her across his saddle bow and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much mistaken.” Piney glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in her slow, deliberate fashion, “I’m sure, I don’t know, but Ralph said he was coming back here every spring, so he can’t expect to take her away this year.” Up in the orchard Mr. Robbins talked of apple culture, of the comparative virtues of Peck’s Pleasants and Shepherd Sweetings, and whether peaches would grow in Gilead’s climate. From the birch woods across the road there came the clinking of a cow bell where Buttercup led some young stock in search of good pasturage. Shad was busy mending the cultivator that had balked that morning, as he was weeding out the rows of June peas. He called over to Mr. Robbins for some advice, and the latter joined him.