Country life -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Grandparents as parents -- Juvenile fiction
From where they stood they seemed to look out over the sea--a sea
roughened by a fresh wind, so that tumbling whitecaps showed on the
tops of the green waves. Not a ship was to be seen, not a gull swept
across the hazy noon-time skies. Just water, water, everywhere, and a
sense of immeasurable distance.
"It's a mirror," Judy explained, "and it reflects a picture on the
other wall."
"It seems just as if I were looking out of a window," said Anne. "I
have never seen the sea, Judy. Never."
"I love it," cried Judy, "there is nothing like it in the whole
world--the smell of it, and the slap of the wind against your cheeks.
Oh, Anne, Anne, if we were only out there in a boat with the wind
whistling through the sails." Her face was all animation now, and
there was a spot of brilliant color in each cheek.
"How beautiful she is," Anne thought to herself. "How very, very
beautiful."
"You must have hated to leave it," she said, presently.
"I shall never get over it," said Judy with a certain fierceness. "I
want to hear the 'boom--boom--boom' of the waves--it is so quiet here,
so deadly, deadly quiet--"
"How sweet your room is," said tactful little Anne, to change the
subject.
"Yes, I do like this room," admitted Judy reluctantly.
There were pictures everywhere---here a dark little landscape, showing
the heart of some old forest, there a flaming garden, all red and blue
and purple in a glare of sunlight. In the alcove was an etching--the
head of a dream-child, and a misty water-color hung over Judy's desk.
"I did that myself," she said, as Anne examined it.
"Oh, do you paint?"
"Some," modestly.
"And play?" Anne's eyes were on the little piano in the alcove.
"Yes."
"Play now," pleaded Anne.
But Judy shook her head. "After dinner," she said. "The bell is
ringing now."
Dinner at Judge Jameson's was a formal affair, commencing with soup and
ending with coffee. It was served in the great dining-room where
silver dishes and tankards twinkled on the sideboard, and where the
light came in through stained-glass windows, so that Anne always had a
feeling that she was in church.
The Judge sat at the head of the table, and his sister, Mrs. Patterson,
at the foot. Judy was on one side and Anne on the other, and back of
them, a silent, competent butler spirited away their plates, and
substituted others with a sort of sleight-of-hand dexterity that almost
took Anne's breath away.
Anne and the Judge chatted together happily throughout the meal. The
Judge was very fond of the earnest maiden, whose grandmother had been
the friend of his youth, and his eyes went often from her sunny face to
that of the moody, silent Judy. "It will do Judy good to be with
Anne," he thought. "I am going to have them together as much as
possible."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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