Page:Mary Rinehart - More Tish .djvu/25

 Rh  "You can't walk with your bad knee," I objected. Tish sniffed.

"You're envious, that's what," she sneered. "While you are sitting at home, overeating and oversleeping and getting fat in mind and body, I shall be on the broad highway, walking between hedgerows of flowering—flowering—well, between hedgerows. While you sleep in stuffy, upholstered rooms I shall lie in woodland glades in my sleeping-bag and see overhead the constellation of of—what's its name. I shall talk to the birds and the birds will talk to me."

Sleeping-bag! That was what Aggie had meant that Miss Swift was making.

"What are you going to do when it rains?"

"It doesn't rain much in May. Anyhow, a friendly farmhouse and a glass of milk—even a barn"

Aggie got up with the light of desperation in her eyes. Aggie hates woods and gnats, has no eye for Nature, and for almost half a century has pampered her body in a featherbed poultice, with the windows closed, until the first of June each year. Yet Aggie rose to the crisis.

"You shan't go alone, Tish," she said stoutly. "You'll forget to change your stockings when your feet are wet and you can't make a cup of coffee fit to drink. I'm going too."