“‘Sleepy fivvers,’” put in Una archly. “You used to say I was as lazy as the white Star of Bethlehem, Daddy dear, and she’s a perfect dormouse, garden dormouse—the little ‘ten o’ clock.’”
“But I—I’d like to see my little girl interested in something else, too, to keep her earth-fast.” Mr. Grosvenor laid his arm tenderly around the shoulders of his only child. “How—how about learning to run one of my big cars? How about becoming interested in radio, like your friend Pemrose? Oh-h! not in listening in on a concert. The laziest lubber-sprite could do that!” with a laugh. “But in riding the whirlwind and directing the storm,” gayly, “the jumble of noises coming through the air taking you by storm. I declare if you could once gossip familiarly of vacuum tube and variometer, current and condenser; if you could pick up one sentence—one word even—from the dot and dash with which the air is forever ticking, I might—”
“What! code. Telegraphy that—that horrid teaser!”
Una curled up like the finical Star of Bethlehem before the blinding beat of a thunder shower.
“I might,” Mr. Grosvenor went on, unheeding, swinging his eyeglasses judicially, “I might, even, decide that you were stern enough stuff, hot stuff enough, to go into camp with the other girls, this summer, and not infect them all with ‘peerie-weerie’ fears—fancies.”
“To camp!” It was a little diverted scream. “Oh! father, you know I’m dying to go—go with Pemrose.”
“Well! I’m beginning to think it might really be better for you than staying here under the care of a governess, while I—while I make a flying trip, business trip, to Europe—and your mother goes to bring me back,” with a shrug. “When do you start? What are your hiking plans?” The big man of affairs, banker, financier, turned to Pemrose.
“Oh! we leave here—I leave here on the tenth of July, seven weeks from now, to pick up my Camp Fire sisters just over the Massachusetts line, where we follow the Greylock Trail until we strike the Long Trail winding right through the Green Mountains, from end to end.”
The girl paused, the lure of the Long Trail unwinding itself remotely in her blue eyes.
“But we don’t follow that, for long, either; we branch off along other mountain trails and—and little snaky, brown roads that stand on their hind legs and grope for the sky,” laughingly, “until—until—four days’ hiking and sleeping out at night—” Pemrose waved a letter, just received—“we come to Mount Pocohosette at the heart of the Green Mountains—”