"What makes Blue Bonnet so still?" Kitty inquired, surprised.
"Take this seat and find out, Little Miss Why," Blue Bonnet retorted with an effort. "Maybe you haven't as much regard for your tongue as I have. I want to keep mine whole."
The low, rambling farmhouse surrounded by green hills and ancient oaks, with cattle grazing peacefully on the gentle slopes, and the farm dog yelping frantically at the big gates, gave Blue Bonnet the worst pang of homesickness she had felt since she left the ranch.
Wreaths of blue smoke curled upward lazily from the kitchen chimney, and from the dooryard came the most tantalizing odors of chicken frying, coffee boiling, and fresh doughnuts.
Blue Bonnet jumped from the wagon and filled her lungs with the delicious fragrance.
"Girls," she cried, "just smell! It's chicken and coffee and--"
"Doughnuts," Amanda finished with rapture. "Wait until you taste them! Aunt Priscilla is a wonder at cooking. She has the best things you ever ate in your life."
Aunt Priscilla appeared in the doorway at that moment, a wholesome sweet-faced woman of middle age, and took the girls in to the spare bedroom to lay off their things and wash before supper.
Blue Bonnet took off her cap and sweater and laid them lightly on the high feather bed with its wonderful patch-work quilt--the "rising sun" pattern running riot through it.
"It's so clean I hate to muss it up with my things," she said, casting about for a chair.
"I speak for this bed," Kitty said, depositing her things carelessly. "I slept in it the last time we came. It's as good as a toboggan. You keep going down and down and--"
"We're going to draw for it," Amanda announced from the wash-stand where she was wrestling with Debby's mud. "It will hold four; the other three girls will have to go in the next room."
"Why couldn't we bring the other bed in here--I mean the springs and mattress?" Debby suggested. "Do you think your aunt would care, Amanda?"
Blue Bonnet took her turn at the wash basin and then wandered into the parlor. She looked about wonderingly. Family portraits done in crayon adorned the walls. A queer little piano, short half an octave, occupied one corner of the room, a marble-topped table, the other. A plush photograph album, a Bible and a copy of Pilgrim's Progress lay on the table. The carpet was green, bold with red roses; roses so vivid in coloring that they seemed to vie with the scarlet geraniums that filled the south window to overflowing.