"He's better?" cried 'Phemie.

The older girl's tone was troubled. "I can't make out that he is," she said, slowly, and then she began to read Aunt Jane's disjointed account of her visit the day before to the hospital:

"I never _do_ like to go to such places, girls; they smell so of ether, and arniky, and collodion, and a whole lot of other unpleasant things. I wonder what makes drugs so nasty to smell of?

"But, anyhow, I seen your father. John Bray is a sick man. Maybe he don't know it himself, but the doctors know it, and you girls ought to know it. I'm plain-spoken, and there isn't any use in making you believe he is on the road to recovery when he's going just the other way.

"This head-doctor here, says he has no chance at all in the city. Of course, for me, if I was sick with anything, from housemaid's knee to spinal mengetus, going into the country would be my complete finish! But the doctors say it's different with your father.

"And just as soon as John Bray can ride in a railroad car, I am going to see that he joins you at Hillcrest."

"Bully!" cried 'Phemie, the optimistic. "Oh, Lyddy! he's bound to get well up here." For this chanced to be a very beautiful spring day and the girls were more than ever enamored of the situation.

"I am not so sure," said Lyddy, slowly.

"Don't be a grump!" commanded her sister. "He's just _got_ to get well up here." But Lyddy wondered afterward if 'Phemie believed what she said herself!

They finished cleaning thoroughly the two rooms they were at present occupying and began on the chambers above. Dust and the hateful spiderwebs certainly had collected in the years the house had been unoccupied; but the Bray girls were not afraid of hard work. Indeed, they enjoyed it.

Toward evening Lucas and his sister appeared, and the former set to work to repair the old pump on the porch, while Sairy sat down to "visit" with the girls of Hillcrest Farm.

"It's goin' to be nice havin' you here, I declare," said Miss Pritchett, who had arranged two curls on either side of her forehead, which shook in a very kittenish manner when she laughed and bridled.

"I guess, as maw says, I'm too much with old folks. Fust I know they'll be puttin' me away in the Home for Indignant Old Maids over there to Adams--though why 'indignant' I can't for the life of me guess, 'nless it's because they're indignant over the men's pa.s.sin' of 'em by!" and Miss Pritchett giggled and shook her curls, to 'Phemie's vast amus.e.m.e.nt.

Indeed, the younger Bray girl confessed to her sister, after the visitors had gone, that Sairy was more fun than Lucas.

"But I'm afraid she's far on the way to the Home for Indigent Spinsters, and doesn't know it," chuckled 'Phemie. "What a freak she is!"

"That's what you called Lucas--at first," admonished Lyddy. "And they're both real kind. Lucas wouldn't take a cent for mending the pump, and Sairy came especially to invite us to the Temperance Club meeting, at the schoolhouse Sat.u.r.day night, and to go to church in their carriage with her and her mother on Sunday."

"Yes; I suppose they _are_ kind," admitted 'Phemie. "And they can't help being funny."

"Besides," said the wise Lyddy, "if we _do_ try to take boarders we'll need Lucas's help. We'll have to hire him to go back and forth to town for us, and depend on him for the outside ch.o.r.es. Why! we'd be like two marooned sailors on a desert island, up here on Hillcrest, if it wasn't for Lucas Pritchett!"

The girls spent a few anxious days waiting for Aunt Jane's answer. And meantime they discussed the project of taking boarders from all its various angles.

"Of course, we can't get boarders yet awhile," sighed 'Phemie. "It's much too early in the season."

"Why is it? Aren't _we_ glad to be here at Hillcrest?" demanded Lyddy.

"But see what sort of a place we lived in," said her sister.

"And lots of other people live hived up in the cities just as close, only in better houses. There isn't much difference between apartment-houses and tenement-houses except the front entrance!"

"That may be epigrammatical," chuckled 'Phemie, "but you couldn't make many folks admit it."

"Just the same, there are people who need just this climate we've got here at this time of year. It will do them as much good as it will father."

"You'd make a regular sanitarium of Hillcrest," cried 'Phemie.

"Well, why not?" retorted Lyddy. "I guess the neighbors wouldn't object."

'Phemie giggled. "Advertise to take folks back to old-fashioned times and old-fashioned cooking."

"Why not?"

"Sleeping on feather beds; cooking in a brick oven like our great-great-grandmothers used to do! Open fireplaces. Great!"

"Plain, wholesome food. They won't have to eat out of cans. No extras or luxuries. We could afford to take them cheap," concluded Lyddy, earnestly.

"And we'll get a big garden planted and feed 'em on vegetables through the summer."

"Oh, Lyddy, it _sounds_ good," sighed 'Phemie. "But do you suppose Aunt Jane will consent to it?"

They received Aunt Jane's letter in reply to their own, on Sat.u.r.day.

"You two girls go ahead and do what you please inside or outside Hillcrest," she wrote, "only don't disturb the old doctor's stuff in the lower rooms of the east ell. As long as you don't burn the house down I don't see that you can do any harm. And if you really think you can find folks foolish enough to want to live up there on the ridge, six miles from a lemon, why go ahead and do it. But I tell you frankly, girls, I'd want to be paid for doing it, and paid high!"

Then the kind, if brusk, old lady went on to tell them where to find many things packed away that they would need if they _did_ succeed in getting boarders, including stores of linen, and blankets, and the like, as well as some good china and old silver, buried in one of the great chests in the attic.

However, nothing Aunt Jane could write could quench the girls' enthusiasm.

Already Lyddy and 'Phemie had written an advertis.e.m.e.nt for the city papers, and five dollars of Lyddy's fast shrinking capital was to be set aside for putting their desires before the newspaper-reading public.

They could feel then that their new venture was really launched.

CHAPTER XI

AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE

It was scarcely dusk on Sat.u.r.day when Lucas drove into the side yard at Hillcrest with the ponies. .h.i.tched to a double-seated buckboard.

Entertainments begin early in the rural districts.

The ponies had been clipped and looked less like animated cowhide trunks than they had when the Bray girls had first seen them and their young master in Bridleburg.

"School teacher came along an' maw made Sairy go with him in his buggy,"

exclaimed Lucas, with a broad grin. "If Sairy don't ketch a feller 'fore long, an' clamp to him, 'twon't be maw's fault."

Lucas was evidently much impressed by the appearance of Lyddy and 'Phemie when they locked the side door and climbed into the buckboard. Because of their mother's recent death the girls had dressed very quietly; but their black frocks were now very shabby, it was coming warmer weather, and the only dresses they owned which were fit to wear to an evening function of any kind were those that they had worn "for best" the year previous.

But the two girls from the city had no idea they would create such a sensation as they did when Lucas pulled in the ponies with a flourish and stopped directly before the door of the schoolhouse.