Part 51

"Oh, why not?" I asked. "Wouldn't they be delighted to keep you?"

"Perhaps. I hope so. But what about you?"

"If it depended one bit on me, you'd make a long visit."

"Wouldn't you really mind seeing me hanging around--sometimes? Just at meals, you know--or to take you a drive once in awhile?"

I looked at him merrily through my talc window, for I felt happy and light-hearted, and the world seemed such a very nice place to live in at that moment.

"Do you truly need to have me answer that question?" I asked. "If you do, we can't be real friends as I thought, after all."

"You say that because you are kind--too kind to have reflected enough, perhaps. An accident--the happiest accident in the world for me--has given me a chance to see something of you, Lady Betty; but do you understand that only by an accident could a rough fellow like me have any place at all in your life, no matter how small or temporary? I don't want to take advantage of that sweet kindness of yours, which is partly all your own, and partly the essence of your youth and innocence."

"Now you are making me very cross," said I. "I won't hear you talk so. You may laugh at me, because we've known each other such a short time, but really and truly you are the best friend I've ever had. I wouldn't lose you for anyone or anything in the world, and I don't mean to, unless you get tired of me--so, there!"

"Tired of you! Good heavens, I tired of you!"

"Very well, then," said I flippantly, "so far as I'm concerned you needn't say 'good-bye' to the Valley Farm till you feel the first symptoms coming on."

"Lady Betty," remarked Mr. Brett, "I wonder if there's another girl like you in the world?"

"According to my Mother, there isn't another so vexing," I replied.

We both laughed; and then he suddenly said, "Here is Aristo."

I stared about wildly. "Where, where?" I asked.

He laughed a great deal more. "Why, you're looking right at the postoffice and the grocery and drygoods store."

Sure enough, there was a brown wooden building at the top of a dusty hill we were just climbing; but there was nothing else anywhere, except a clear brown creek, and some sweet-smelling meadows with a white horse gazing in a bored way over rather a queer fence, and some cows asleep under a clump of maple trees on our side of a young birch grove.

"Where's the rest of it?" I went on. "Where are the other shops, and the houses, and the people?"

"Oh, the other shops and the houses aren't built yet, but they may be any time; and then the people will come. But the fact that they haven't come yet doesn't prevent this from being Aristo. The slow trains from Cleveland stop just behind that hill, several times a day, which is very convenient for the farmers in the neighbourhood, otherwise they would have to go all the way to Arcona, twelve miles away. But you mustn't think this is the only place you will have to do your shopping when you're at the Valley Farm. Wait till you see Hermann's Corners. There's a great Emporium there, and you'll ruffle the feelings of half the ladies of Summer County if you don't fall in love with it, and its proprietor, Whit Walker. Promise you'll let me be the first one to introduce you to both?"

I promised, and wanted to be prepared for what I must expect to find; but Mr. Brett would tell me nothing. He said that neither the great Whit Walker nor Hermann's Corners Emporium could possibly be described for the comprehension of a foreigner.

We were in a sweet and gracious country now. It looked as if Mother Nature would never allow any of her children who obeyed her, to be poor or unhappy here. As we whizzed along the up and down road between billowing meadows of grain, we could see here and there a farm house showing between trees, or peering over the brow of a rounded hill; but there was none where I longed to stop until we came in sight of a dear, old, red-brick house--really old, not what some Americans call old. It was set back several hundred yards from the road, and an avenue of magnificent maples--each one a great green temple--led up to the comfortable, rose-draped porch which sheltered the door. There was an old-fashioned garden on one side, with a running flame of hollyhocks hemming it in; the background was a dark green oak and maple grove; and in a clover meadow beyond the garden was a colony of beehives. It looked an ideal, storybook place, and I wished it might be the Valley Farm, but thought such a thing too good to be true. When one is going to stop at a house one has never seen, as Vic says, it usually turns out to be the one of all others you like least.

So I was delighted when we turned in at the open gate with its guardian apple tree on either side. We sailed up the avenue under the maples, but instead of making for the front entrance, turned off into a farm road which led round the side of the house, and the tooting of our horn brought three women smiling and waving to a door under a long, narrow verandah before we stopped.

One was a tall, thin, middle-aged woman, with grey-brown hair pulled away from her forehead and done in a knob at the back of her head. Her skin was sunburned; she wore a black and white print frock, without so much as a ruffle or tuck, and her sleeves were rolled up over her sun-browned arms above the elbow; she had no real pretensions to being pretty, and yet, somehow, she was one of the nicest-looking women I ever saw. She had the sort of expression in her eyes, and in her smile, you would like your mother to have, if you could have had your mother made to order exactly according to your own ideas.

On her right stood a very pretty girl with a dazzling white complexion, all the whiter for a gold-powder of freckles; black eyes rather deep set, dimples, and a quantity of curly, bright-red hair wound in a crown of braids round her head. She was in print, too, but it was blue, and very becoming.

On the tall woman's left was another girl, also pretty, though in a florid way, with great blue eyes, a full mouth, and a mouse-coloured fringe down to her eyebrows. She was more elaborately dressed than the others, with a lot of coarse lace on her blouse, and a pink skirt. But she hadn't the look of simple refinement which the first two had in spite of their plain clothes and rolled-up sleeves. All three waved something excitedly. One had a huge kitchen spoon, another a book, and the third a towel.

"Howdy, Cousin Jim!" cried the nice woman with the expression, as Mr. Brett stopped the car in front of the door. "We're mighty glad to see you again. This is the young Lady Bulkeley, isn't it? We're mighty glad to see her, too, and we're going to try to make her as happy as we can."

"I knew you would, Cousin Fanny, or I wouldn't have brought her to you," said Mr. Brett, jumping out and helping me down. "But she's Lady Betty."

"I thought that would be a little too familiar to begin with," said the dear woman, with a perfectly angelic smile, and a pleasant American accent with rather more roll of the "r" than I'd heard in the East. "But you shall be called just what you like best, my dear."

"Shall I? Then I should like you to call me Betty," said I, shaking hands hard with Mr. Brett's Cousin Fanny, and my heart warming to her for her own sake as well as his. There was a good smell about her of linen dried on the grass and of freshly-baked cake. I can never smell those smells, I know, without remembering her.