"How beautiful!" said Aunt Jessica's voice from the kitchen window. "You have made an exquisite thing, dear."
Elliott rested the basket on the window ledge and surveyed it proudly. "Isn't it lovely? And I don't think cutting this has hurt the borders a bit."
"I am sure not." Aunt Jessica's busy hands went back to her yellow mixing-bowl. "You know where the Gordons live, don't you?--in the big brick house at the cross-roads."
"Yes," said Elliott, and her feet carried her out of the yard, stopping only long enough to let her get her pink parasol from the hall, and down the hill toward the cross-roads. It was odd about Elliott's feet, when she hadn't quite made up her mind whether or not she would go. Her feet seemed to have no doubt of it.
The pink parasol threw a becoming light on her face, as she knew it would, and the odor of heliotrope rose pleasantly in her nostrils as she walked along. But the basket grew heavy, astonishingly heavy. She wouldn't have believed a culling-basket with a few flowers in it could weigh so much. The farther Elliott walked, the heavier it grew. And she hadn't gone a quarter of the way, either.
A horse's feet coming up rapidly behind her turned the girl's steps to the side of the road. The horse drew abreast and stopped, prancing. "Want a lift?" asked the man in the wagon. He was a big grizzled farmer, a friend of her uncle's.
Elliott nodded, smiling. "Oh, thank you!"
"Aren't they lovely! Aunt Jessica is sending them to Mrs. Gordon."
"That's right! That's right! Say, just look at them pansies, now! Flowers, they don't do nothin' but grow for that aunt of yours. She don't have to much more 'n look at 'em."
Elliott laughed. "She weeds them, I happen to know. I helped her this afternoon."
"Did you, now! But there's a difference in folks. Take my wife: she plants 'em and plants 'em, but she can't keep none. They up and die on her, sure thing."
Elliott selected a purple pansy. "This looks to me as though it would like to get into your buttonhole, Mr. Blair."
"Sho, now!" He flushed with pleasure, driving slowly as the girl fitted the pansy in place, a bit of heliotrope nestling beside it. "Smells good, don't it? Mother always had heliotrope in her garden. Takes me back to when I was a little shaver."