“I can go any time, and so can Beth,” said Louise.

“All I need is the blue stockings,” laughed Patsy.

“It won’t be play.  This means work,” said Uncle John seriously.

“Well, I believe we’re capable of a certain amount of work,” replied Beth.  “Aren’t we, girls?”

“We are!”

“All right,” said Mr. Merrick.  “I’ll go and look up the next train.  Go home, Louise, and pack up.  I’ll telephone you.”

“That bad man ’d better look out,” chuckled the Major.  “He doesn’t suspect that an army of invasion is coming.”

“Daddy,” cried Patsy, “you hush up.  We mean business.”

“If you win,” said the Major, “I’ll run for alderman on a petticoat platform, and hire your services.”

CHAPTER II

THE ARTIST

To most people the great rambling mansion at Elmhurst, with its ample grounds and profusion of flowers and shrubbery, would afford endless delight.  But Kenneth Forbes, the youthful proprietor, was at times dreadfully bored by the loneliness of it all, though no one could better have appreciated the beauties of his fine estate.

The town, an insignificant village, was five miles distant, and surrounding the mansion were many broad acres which rather isolated it from its neighbors.  Moreover, Elmhurst was the one important estate in the county, and the simple, hard-working farmers in its vicinity considered, justly enough, that the owner was wholly out of their class.

This was not the owner’s fault, and Kenneth had brooded upon the matter until he had come to regard it as a distinct misfortune.  For it isolated him and deprived him of any social intercourse with his neighbors.

The boy had come to live at Elmhurst when he was a mere child, but only as a dependent upon the charities of Aunt Jane, who had accepted the charge of the orphan because he was a nephew of her dead lover, who had bequeathed her his estate of Elmhurst.  Aunt Jane was Kenneth’s aunt merely in name, since she had never even married the uncle to whom she had been betrothed, and who had been killed in an accident before the boy was born.

She was an irritable old woman, as Kenneth knew her, and had never shown him any love or consideration.  He grew up in a secluded corner of the great house, tended merely by servants and suffered to play in those quarters of the ample grounds which Aunt Jane did not herself visit.  The neglect which Kenneth had suffered and his lonely life had influenced the youth’s temperament, and he was far from being an agreeable companion at the time Aunt Jane summoned her three nieces to Elmhurst in order to choose one of them as her heiress.  These girls, bright, cheery and wholesome as they were, penetrated the boy’s reserve and drew him out of his misanthropic moods.  They discovered that he had remarkable talent as an artist, and encouraged him to draw and paint, something he had long loved to do in secret.