The Project Gutenberg EBook of Strawberry Acres, by Grace S. Richmond

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Title: Strawberry Acres

Author: Grace S. Richmond

Release Date: April 26, 2004 [EBook #12164]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAWBERRY ACRES ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Strawberry Acres

By GRACE S. RICHMOND

1911

TO THE OWNER OF "GRASSLANDS"

CONTENTS

PART I.—FIVE MILES OUT

CHAPTER

I. Five Miles Out

II. Everybody Explores

III. The Apartment Overflows

IV. Arguments and Answers

V. Telephones and Tents

VI. In the Pine Grove

VII. Everybody is Satisfied

VIII. Problems and Hearts

IX. Max Compromises

X. Jack-O'-Lantern

PART II.—THE LANES AND THE ACRES

I. What's in a Name

II. In the Old Garden

III. Afternoon Tea

IV. Two and Two

V. On an August Evening

VI. Time-Tables

VII. The Southbound Limited

VIII. From April North

IX. Round the Corner

X. Green Leaves

Strawberry Acres

PART I.—FIVE MILES OUT

CHAPTER I

FIVE MILES OUT

The four Lanes—Max, Sally, Alec and Robert—climbed the five flights of stairs to their small flat with the agility of youth and the impetus of high but subdued excitement. Uncle Timothy Rudd, following more slowly, reached the outer door of the little suite of rooms in time to hear what seemed to be the first outburst.

"Well, what do you think now?"

"Forty-two acres and the house! Open the windows and give us air!"

"Acres run to seed, and the house tumbling down about its own ears! A magnificent inheritance that!" Max cast his hat upon a chair as if he flung it away with the inheritance.

"But who ever thought Uncle Maxwell Lane would ever leave his poor relations anything?" This was Sally.

"Five miles out by road—a bit less by trolley. Let's go and see it to-morrow afternoon. Thank goodness a half holiday is so near."

"Anybody been by the place lately?"

"I was, just the other day, on my wheel. I didn't think it looked so awfully bad." This was Robert, the sixteen-year-old.

As Uncle Timothy entered the tiny sitting-room Sally was speaking. She had thrown her black veil back over her hat, revealing masses of flaxen hair, and deep blue eyes glowing with interest. Her delicate cheeks were warmly flushed, partly with excitement, and partly because for two hours now—during the journey from the flat to the lawyer's office, the period spent therein listening to the reading of Uncle Maxwell Lane's will and the business appertaining thereto, and the return trip home—she had worn the veil closely drawn. Her simple mourning was to her a screen behind which to shield herself from curious eyes, always attracted by those masses of singularly fair hair and the unusual contours of the young face beneath.

"I think it's a godsend, if ever anything was," she was saying. "Here's Max, killing himself in the bank, and Alec growing pale and grouchy in the office, and even Bob—" She was interrupted by a chorus of protests against her terms of description.

"I'm not killing myself!"

"Pale and grouchy! I'm not a patch on—"

"What's the matter with Bob, Sally Lunn?"

"And Uncle Timmy," continued Sally, undisturbed by interpolations to which she was quite accustomed, "pining for fresh air—."

"I walk in the park every day, my dear," Uncle Timothy felt obliged to remind her.

"Yes, I know. But you've lived in a little city flat just as long as it's good for you, and you need to be turned outdoors. So do we all. Oh, boys, and Uncle Timmy!—I just sat there, crying and smiling under my veil in that dreadful office—crying to think that I couldn't cry for Uncle Maxwell, because he was so cold and queer to us always, and yet he had given us this property, after all—."

"And a mighty small fraction of the estate it is, I hope you understand!" growled Max.

But Sally went on without minding. Everybody was used to Max's growls. "And smiling because I couldn't help it just to think we had a chance at last to get out of the city. We can do it. Five miles by trolley is nothing for you boys, or for me, when I need to come in."

"You're not talking about our going to live out there!" Max's tone was derisive.

"Why not?"

"Have you seen the place lately?"

"Not since I was a little girl, but I remember I thought it was lovely then."

"It isn't lovely now, if it ever was—which I doubt. In the first place it belongs to that little suburb of Wybury—as commonplace a village as ever existed within five miles of as big a city as this. In the second place it's as much an abandoned farm as neglect can make a place that was once, I suppose, an aristocratic sort of country home. The old mansion is as big as a barn, and as hopeless. You couldn't any more make a home out of it!—Why, you could put this whole apartment into the room at the left of the hall!"

"How do you know so much about it?" demanded Sally. "None of us has been there since Aunt Alicia died—that was when we were children, and Uncle Maxwell used to spend his summers there."

"He hasn't spent them there since she died," Max asserted. "How do I know so much about it? I was down there last summer with Frank Sustis. His father sent him out to look the place over, with a view to buying it himself for a summer home. You should have heard Prank jeer at the idea while we were going about."

"It makes no difference," persisted Sally, removing her hat and folding the veil with care. "I want to see it. We'll go out to-morrow, won't we?"

She appealed to her second brother, Alec, a young fellow of twenty, who had thrown himself listlessly into a chair but who was listening attentively to the discussion. He nodded. "Of course. You couldn't keep one of us away, even Max. He wouldn't be done out of the pleasure of showing us over the place and pointing out the defects, if, by keeping still, he could own the whole ranch himself."

"It'll be jolly fun to go!" cried Bob, quickly. He could not bear sounds of disagreement between the members of his family, because he knew Sally did not like it.