“Yes, we could,” said Molly, and meant it. “But when Grace gets home, I’m going to begin talking S. P. to her. She will be dead tired, and perhaps the woods will look good to her. We’ll do all the work.”
“Oh, Molly! They’d let us go with Grace!”
“Father has a piece of woods on Lake Michigan, or very near it,” offered Leigh. “I heard him say that he had sold a piece of it off not long ago. I never saw it, but it’s quite wild, Mother said. He always meant to build two or three cottages there, one for us, but he never has.”
“I feel my brain expanding, girls,” soberly said Jean. “Find out, if it is permissible, to whom your father sold that land. Also please ask him if it has water and is free from wild animals!”
Leigh laughingly said that she would make every inquiry suggested except the last. “There isn’t a bear left in the state except ‘way in the north.”
“Nevertheless, Jean and Leigh,” said Nan, “I don’t believe that the boys would build on Michigan. More likely, if they are not close, they’ve gone on to what we call Lake Baldy because of all the eagles around there. The boys like that lake because there is such grand fishing there and more room to row and get around. I’ve heard Jimmy say so.”
“Time will tell who is right,” said Bess. “Come on; the scare is over. Let’s go on to where all those trees are with such tiny foliage. They are just likely to be full of warblers.”
The forlorn, tumble-down place of the Kleins was on what had once been its own private road, the road that led into a large, well-kept farm of thrifty German immigrants. But this was long ago. A worthless son and a still more worthless grandson had scattered the holdings. The woodland and nearly all of the farm besides had been sold off for debts and living. All that was left numbered a few acres and those badly kept in the intervals of Jacob Klein’s drinking.
Mrs. Klein, Jacob’s wife, was almost as far from German thrift and ideas of cleanliness as her husband, though, if some one else did the work, she was capable of having things done. And it was the girl known as Greta Klein that did them, for Greta did not even go to school. The district was thinly populated, or had been until people began to build cottages on the farther end of the lake. No one took an interest in these unattractive people and though it was quite probable that a school census had been taken and a visitor had called, possibly more than once, so far as Greta might have known, no one summoned her to school, no one passed that way to go to school, and Greta had never seen the quite distant spot where learning was the central idea.