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Updated: July 19, 2025
Thornwood, shabby and neglected, could still afford to drowse in the sunshine and smile over the past.
It was the dried hip of a wild rose, that had been transferred from pocket to pocket since the day it dared to bloom before its time, in a cranny of the stone wall that circled the garden at Thornwood. The touch of it brought back an old barrel hammock under the lilacs, and the glowing eyes of a girl, lifted to his with a look of trusting innocence.
Miss Lady has rented Thornwood from the man who bought it, and we are all to go out there this spring." "Heavens! That means frogs and crickets and whippoorwills, and a lonesome time for me." "But think of Father!" said Hattie with her most virtuous air. "If it's perfectly quiet, perhaps he can finish his book." "No, he won't," said Connie petulantly.
The homesickness that had hung over her since the day she had turned her back on Thornwood would have enveloped her completely had it not been for Connie. Connie was but a year her junior, and was thoroughly disapproved by the family connection. She enjoyed the reputation of being frivolous and vain, and wholly lacking in reverence to her elders.
After that one dreary week followed another, with the same invasion of strangers, the same varying reports from the sick room. Gradually, however, the reports became more favorable, the tension eased, visitors became less frequent, and Thornwood began to settle down to its normal state.
Then, as if to divert me, he rather fussily refused the correct evening stick I had chosen for him and seized a knobby bit of thornwood suitable only for moor and upland work, and brazenly quite discarded the gloves. "Feel a silly fool wearing gloves when there's no reason!" he exclaimed pettishly. "Quite so, sir," I replied, freezing instantly. "Now, don't play the juggins," he retorted.
His one consolation these days was in the fact that Miss Lady would not have to give up Thornwood. Through an agent he had leased the place to the Queeringtons for the next two years at an absurdly low sum, and the thought of her in the midst of her beloved surroundings went far to reconcile him to the meagerness of his own.
Cropsie Decker could have helped him, but Cropsie was in Mexico. To Noah Wicker he had ceased to be an individual, he had become a client, a first client, and personalities were swamped in abstractions. The only place where he could have found sympathy and understanding was at Thornwood, the hospitable door of which he had resolutely closed with his own hand.
A new sprightliness was observable in his gait, a briskness in his speech, which Aunt Caroline did not hesitate to characterize as "taking on airs." The blood of a butler coursed through Uncle Jimpson's veins, a stately, ebony butler who had been wont to stand at the Thornwood door during the old days and hold a silver tray covered with boutonnieres, for the arriving guests.
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