Mrs. Townsend, looking up from her letter, glanced out in her turn. "There is certainly no need to keep track of them," she observed. "What your Grandfather Townsend could have been thinking of when he built this house on the very edge of such a fine lot----"
"Grandfather Townsend was a shrewd old man, and had an eye to the sale of lots on the farther side of the house when land got high here," was Forrest's explanation.
Five minutes later he was out of the house and crossing the lawn to the stables--a gay and gallant young figure in his riding clothes. From the window of his own room upstairs Murray watched his brother go, feeling bitterly, as he often did, the contrast between Forrest's superb young health and his own crippled condition, the result of an accident two years before, and the illness which had followed it.
"Don't get outdoors enough!" he said to himself. "I fancy if I could go tearing out of the house like that every morning, jump on Bluebottle, and gallop off down Frankfort Boulevard I could get outdoor air enough to keep me healthy."
An hour afterward there was a knock at his door, and a child's voice called: "O Murray, may I come in?"
His thirteen-year-old sister Shirley somehow seemed nearer to Murray than any other member of his family. "Come in!" he responded.
"O Murray," the little sister began instantly, "some new people are moving into the little brown house, and there 's a girl just my age! She looks so nice! I 've been watching her. She 's helping wash windows. Oh, please come into the den and let me show you!"
From the 'den' it could all be seen. There were two girls on the small porch, each washing a window. The elder girl looked as if she were about eighteen, her abundant curly hair, of a decided reddish brown, being worn low at her neck after the fashion of girls of that age. Even across the street the observers could see that she had a merry face, full of life and colour.
The younger girl, was about Shirley's size, round-faced and sturdy, and apparently of an amiable frame of mind, for having accidentally tipped over her pail, she took the mishap in the jolliest spirit, and throwing back her thick brown braids of hair, mopped up the swimming porch with lively flourishes.