Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/148

132 only in the country. See how may different kinds I have here,” and Julia began to tell them off: “wild roses, St. John’s-wort. Why don’t you gather some, Brenda; they’d be lovely on the table this evening.”

“Perhaps I will on my way home. I don’t want to take off my gloves now. They ’re so very hard to fasten.”

Nora, however, followed Julia’s example, and they soon had two large bunches of wild flowers, including more  than a dozen different kinds.

Amy saw the three friends as they approached the house. She was hulling strawberries, and this, you know, is a kind of work that stains the fingers rather hopelessly. She was seated on the side-steps with the bowl on her lap, as the girls drew near, and her first impulse was almost to  throw it with its ruddy contents one side. Sensible girl though she was, she did not like to have them find her  engaged in what she considered a half-menial occupation. Instead of yielding to the foolish impulse, however, she did the more sensible thing, and advanced with the bowl  in her hand. She knew that they must have seen her from the road, and had she permitted them to ring the  door-bell, she knew that they would have had to wait  some time before she could enter the house to answer it.

“Oh, can’t we sit here with you?” cried Brenda cordially, “there’s room for one of us on the step, and those two dear little chairs,”—and she pointed to two at some  distance back of the house,—“will be just the thing for  the others.”