“There’s a red silk rose at home among some of Mother’s things. I know she’d love you to have it. She’ll be home soon, and I’ll bring it down to you when I find the rose.” The very last thing that Cynthy called from the door as they all trooped down the path, was the injunction to Kit not to forget the rose. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said enthusiastically to Jean, as they skated home. “She must be seventy or eighty, Jean, but she longs for a red rose. I don’t believe age amounts to a thing, really and truly, except for wrinkles and rheumatism. I’ll bet two cents when I’m as old as Cynthy is, I’ll be hankering after pink satin slippers and a breakfast cap with rosebuds.” Jean laughed happily. The outing had brought the bright color to her cheeks, and it seemed as if she felt a premonition of good tidings even before they reached the house up on the pine-crowned hill. She was singing with Doris as they turned in at the gateway and went up the winding drive, but Kit’s eagle eye discovered signs of fresh tracks in the snow. “There’s been a team or a sleigh in here since we went out,” she called back to them, and all at once Doris gave an excited little squeal of joy, and dashed ahead, waving to somebody who stood at the side window, the big, sunny bay window where the plant stand stood. Then Kit ran, and after her Helen, and Jean too, all speeding along the drive to the wide front steps and into the spacious doors, where the Motherbird stood waiting to clasp them in her arms. CHAPTER XII FIRST AID TO PROVIDENCE It was after supper that night when the younger ones were in bed that Jean had a chance to talk alone with her mother, one of those intimate heart to heart talks she dearly loved. Mr. Robbins was so much improved in health that it really seemed as if he were his old self once more. The girls had hung around him all the evening, delighted at the change for the better. “It’s worth everything to see him looking so well,” Helen had said in her grave, grown-up way. “All the winter of trials and Mrs. Gorham, and the pump breaking.” “Yes, and to think,” Jean said to her mother, as the girls made ready for the procession upstairs to bed, “to think that Uncle Hal got well too.” “I think it was half an excuse to coax us west, his illness,” laughed Mrs. Robbins, “and I told him so. But, oh, my chicks, if you could only see the ranch and live out there for a while. It took me back so to my girlhood, the freedom and sweep of it all. There is something about the west and its mountains you never get out of your system once you have known and loved them. I want you all to go out there some day.” “Isn’t it a pity that one of us isn’t a boy,” said Kit meditatively. “Just because we are all girls, we can’t go in for that sort of a life, and I’d love it. At least for a little while. I’d like my life to be a whole lot of experiences, one after the other.”