The first few days in the new home were filled with wonder and delight for them all. They just could not get used to having plenty of room indoors, with all outdoors for a playground. Doris's cheeks took on a lovely pink, and her eyes began to sparkle. She and Harley spent all day out-of-doors. They were making a garden. Not that they had any experience or any utensils. There was an old hoe and a broken spade down in the basement of the barn, and with these Harley managed to remove a few square feet of young turf, and mellow up an inch or two of soil depth. In this they planted violet roots and buttercups and daisies which they found in the meadows. Doris had a corner all her own, with neat rows of tiny stones from the brook laid in elaborate baby-patterns around the edge, and in this she stuck twigs and weeds of all descriptions, and was never daunted, only pained and surprised when they drooped and died in a day or two and had to be supplanted by others.
It had been decided that Harley was to stop school and stay at home with mother and Doris, which indeed he was quite willing to do under the glamour of the new life. The school itself never had much attraction for him, and "the fellows" were almost forgotten in searching for angleworms and building dams in the creek.
Carol went to high school every morning with Shirley and George on the trolley. There were only six more weeks till the term was over, and it was better for Carol to finish out her year and get her credits. Shirley thought they could afford the extra carfare for just that little while, and so all day long mother and Doris and Harley kept quiet home in the old barn, and the meadows rang with Doris's shouts and Harley's answers.
One day the doctor came out in his machine to see Mrs. Hollister as he had promised to do, and found her so much better that he told her she might get up and go around a little while every day if she was very careful not to get over-tired. He prophesied a speedy return to health if she kept on looking happy and breathing this good air. He praised the good sense that brought her out into the country to live, in preference to any little tucked-up house in town, and said if she could only get well enough to work outdoors in the ground and have a flower-bed it would be the making of her. Her eyes brightened at that, for she loved flowers, and in the days of her youth had been extremely successful at making things grow.