“Let’s go and see if we can find it,” cried Jean.
Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found one terrace that dipped into a sunken space once walled in. Now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose bushes, and several of the large bushes looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Tommy declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilothouse off some boat.
Doris, sitting down on the broad front steps, was listening to the music of falling water in the distance and the wind overhead in the great, slumberous pines. There were four of these, two on each side of the long terrace, with rock maples down near the rock wall and several pear and cherry trees. Along the terrace were flower beds, three on each one, outlined with clam shells.
“Miss Trowbridge used to have gladiolus set out in those beds, with pansies and sweet alyssum set around the edges, and outside again, old-hen-and-her-chickens. They looked real pretty.”
“Who was Miss Trowbridge, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig. She sat beside Jean, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her hat lying beside her. There was a look of content on her face, a look that had been a stranger there for many months. Tommy tossed a spray of half-blossomed cherry twigs in her lap and ran away again.
“She was sister to the Trowbridge that owned the mills. She married some man out in Canada, lived awhile out there, then gave up and died. She never did have much backbone that I could see, but she loved flowers. Did you notice a big glass bay window off the dining room? She called that her conservatory. I remember asking her once if it was her ‘conversationary,’ and how she did laugh at me! Well, every one can’t be expected to know everything. It’s all I can do to keep up with Elmhurst these days. Her name was Francelia and she married a McRae.”
“But who had the place after she and her brother died?”
Rebecca never believed in directness when it came to genealogies. She delighted in them, and would slip her glasses down to the middle of her long nose, elevate her chin, and go after a family tree like a government forester.