Page:Hollyhock house; a story for girls (IA hollyhockhousest00tagg).pdf/45

Rh bringing home that dog and now a boy, there’s no telling what the end will be! Of course I knew he was at supper; he looks a nice sort; I’ll grant him that. Go on, Mary; Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are this minute crossing over. I’ll see that the ewer is filled in the boy’s room, and more than that it doesn’t need done to it; that, and a pair of towels.”

“There’s no housekeeper like our Anne! You can’t catch her napping,” laughed Mary, hastening out to help receive her guardian and his wife.

The Garden girls and their absurdly un-uncle-fied young uncle had a habit of sitting out in their garden in the evening from such an early date in the spring that everybody croaked “malaria,” till so late a date in the autumn that, figuratively speaking, the neighbourhood clothed them in shrouds and got out its own funeral garments.

But Vineclad, sitting some fifteen miles back from the Hudson River, never administered malaria to its trusting children, and the old Garden garden could never have been persuaded to harm its three girls, between whom and it was a love profoundly sympathetic.

Mary found Jane, Florimel, Win, and Mark,