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"But oh most of all, I want to hear Green Valley folks say with their eyes and hands and voice 'Hello, Nanny Ainslee, when did you get back' and 'My, Nanny, it's good to see and have you home again. So, John Roger Churchill Knight, take me down to see my home town Green Valley at springtime." They went down through Green Valley streets where the spring sunshine lay warm and golden.
I'm going to send out invitations for a social gathering before long." She rose lazily to her feet, and carefully set her cup on the table. "I suppose Miss Ainslee will be sound asleep," she remarked, yawning. "Lighting the gas will awaken her and she will be cross. She goes to bed with the chickens." "Don't light it, then," suggested Grace. "You can see to undress with the blind up.
"And I am tremendously glad," said Polly. "I liked Mr. Perkins very well, but Miss Ainslee is such an improvement on him. Is she to go out with us, Aunt Ada?" "Yes." "Then that is what Uncle Dick meant when he said it concerned him. He was thinking how nice it would be to travel all that way with her." "He's looking further than that," remarked Miss Ada with a smile.
To Polly, Miss Ainslee was a paragon of perfection. She had never before known so dainty and pretty a young lady. The tutor which she and her brothers had was a young man who had gone to Colorado for his health, and when stranded in Denver was chanced upon by Dick Reid who befriended him and brought him home, where he was glad enough to teach the niece and nephews of his former college mate.
I guess that's just about what he is a Christian scientist." Nanny was cross. She had lost her bubbling merriment and her family wondered. "Sis, I believe you will be an old maid, all right. I'm beginning to see the signs already," her brother lazily told her one day when to some innocent remark of his she made a snapping answer. Mr. Ainslee laughed.
When she left the room her father was a little worried and her brother a little uncomfortable. "I guess we'd better let up on the teasing, Dad," the boy suggested in the serious, soft voice that had been his mother's, the mother who had never teased. "I wouldn't hurt Nanny for the world," penitently murmured Mr. Ainslee.
From the few short words with which it began "Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life" to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of Christopher North could make it.
You please go and get the kids I mean the little girls all settled and I will play butler." To this Miss Ainslee would not consent, but she dismissed the children who fled out with excited whispers, and presently, to their great satisfaction, they were served with heaping saucers of ice cream and delicious little cakes.
Miss Ainslee informed her visitors of this fact with an unmistakable sigh of relief that Grace interpreted with a slight smile. As she went slowly down the stairs to the living room, followed by Arline, whose baby face wore an expression of deepest gloom, the door bell rang and the maid admitted the newspaper girl.
So Green Valley looked and smiled and went joyously home to its fragrant, old-fashioned Sunday dinner. New elements might and would come but this smiling town would absorb them, mellow them to its own golden hue and go on its way living and rejoicing. Cynthia's son went to dinner with the Ainslees. He walked with Mr. Ainslee while Nan and her brother went on ahead.
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