“Oh, it’s pretty enough,” returned Ernest, turning back and clucking to the horse.

Gladys enjoyed Faith’s pleasure.  She would not try to show off Vera’s supreme accomplishment in this rattlety-banging wagon.  How it did jounce over occasional stones in the country road!

[Illustration:  “I HEAR A SHEEP”]

Ellen smiled at her as the child took hold of her arm in fear of losing her balance.  “That was a ‘thank-ye-ma’am,’” she said, as the wagon suddenly bounded over a little hillock.  “Didn’t you see what a pretty curtsy we all made?”

But Gladys thought it was rather uncomfortable and that Ernest drove too fast, considering the state of the toads.

“This wagon has such nice springs,” said Faith.  She was eager to take Vera into her own hands, but no wonder Gladys liked to hold her when she had only had her such a short time.

Aunt Martha was standing on the piazza to welcome the company when they arrived.  She was an elderly woman with spectacles, and it had to be explained to her, also, that Ellen was not Gladys’s mother.

The maid was so well dressed in her quiet street suit that aunt Martha groaned in spirit at first at the prospect of caring for a fashionable city servant; and it was a relief when the stranger looked up and said pleasantly:  “I’m just Ellen.”

There was an hour left before dinner, and Faith and Ernest carried Gladys off to a place they called the grove.  The farmhouse was painted in light yellow and white.  It was built on a grassy slope, and at the foot of a gentle hill a pretty pond lay, and out from this flowed a brook.  If one kept quite still he could hear the soft babble of the little stream even from the piazza.  Nearer by was a large elm-tree, so wide-spreading that the pair of Baltimore orioles who hung their swaying nest on one limb scarcely had a bowing acquaintance with the robins who lived on the other side.  The air was full of pleasant scents, and Gladys followed her hosts willingly, far to the right side of the house, where a stone wall divided the grounds from a piece of woodland.  Her cousins bounded over the wall, and she tried to find a safe spot for her dainty, thin shoe, the large doll impeding her movements.

“Oh, let me take her!” cried Faith eagerly, seeing her cousin’s predicament; and as she carefully lifted the beautiful Vera, she added:  “Help Gladys over, Ernest.”

Ernest was very unused to girls who had to be helped, and he was rather awkward in trying to give his cousin assistance, but as Gladys tetered on the unsteady stones, she grasped his strong shoulder and jumped down.

“Father and Ernest cleared this grove out for us,” explained Faith.  All the underbrush had been carried away and the straight, sweet-smelling pines rose from a carpet of dry needles.  A hammock was swung between two trees.  It was used more by the children’s mother than by them, as they were too active to care for it; but Gladys immediately ran toward it, her recovered doll in her arms, and seated herself in the netting.  Her cousins regarded her admiringly as she sat there pushing herself with her dainty shoe-tips.