"Of course!" chimed that pleased matron; "we want to see all the establishment. When we come back, I'm going down in the kitchen."
"I wish you would," pleaded the host fervently.
Mrs. Randall, who had no children of her own, had a mother's heart for all: she had been longing to get out to this bachelor's establishment ever since it was set up, but the doctor was always too busy. She was going to make the best of the opportunity, and if this "boy" had any need her bright eyes could see, she was resolved to help him fill it.
"Go get your hat, Edward; we'll all come in afterwards."
And the young man ran back up the steps, all his pretty speeches unsaid.
"We'll go out to the vineyard first," suggested the professor, hurrying ahead, with Mrs. Randall close behind him, in the narrow path beaten along the tangle of yellow Jerusalem apples and prickly Spanish needles and wild grasses.
The farm was still in sorry order. The ground of the orchard close to the house was covered with tangled, browning weeds, in some of the trees the late winesaps shone red and ruddy. Frances stopped to fill her hands with them.
"Don't eat those; I have some splendid ones in the house for you."
"These are fine!" She set her white teeth in the red fruit. "I like these best, I like to pull them."
"Nothing is, here; it's all yours--" he began eagerly.
"Oh, thanks! Had you a Spanish ancestor?"
"English on each side," he declared stoutly.
"You look it," she assented, with one quick look at his fair face and a swift noting of his sturdiness.
"The Saxons are truth-tellers," he urged.
But the professor had paused at the pig-pen near the orchard's edge. "Fine hogs!" he called back to his host, "Cheshire?"
Edward joined him reluctantly. "That one is," he said, pointing to the pinkish-white sides of a lazy, fat wallower.
"Who's going to make your sausage and dry your lard?" asked Mrs. Randall quickly.
"Come on, Frances," called her father, for that young woman was still loitering under the apple-trees.
Mr. Holloway took the lead towards the vineyard. The Northrup estate numbered many acres, but not many valuable ones. They were too high up the mountains, which ran steeply to their crests a bare five hundred yards behind the house. This narrow valley at its base sheltered from the north was fertile, and wound straight at the foot of the peaks for nearly a mile. Close to the house was the vineyard; beyond the vines, the cornfields, above there on the mountain side, the woodland.