He would like to work in the Hamilton fields, he thought, knee-deep in
daisies,--fields on whose grass he had not stepped since he was a boy
just big enough to _go_ behind the cart and "rake after." What an
evening it had been! None of them had known it, but as a matter of fact
they had all scaled Shiny Wall and had been sitting with Mother Carey in
Peacepool; that was what had made everything so beautiful! Mr.
Hamilton's last glimpse of the Careys had been the group at the Yellow
House gate. Mrs. Carey, with her brown hair shining in the moonlight
leaned against Gilbert, the girls stood beside her, their arms locked in
hers, while Peter clung sleepily to her hand.
"I believe they are having hard times!" he thought, "and I can't think
of anything I can safely do to make things easier. Still, one cannot
pity, one can only envy them! That is the sort of mother I would have
made had I been Nature and given a free hand! I would have put a label
on Mrs. Carey, saying: 'This is what I meant a woman to be!'"
XXXIV
NANCY COMES OUT
Nancy's seventeenth birthday was past, and it was on the full of the
August moon that she finally "came out" in the Hamilton barn. It was the
barn's first public appearance too, for the villagers had not been
invited to the private Saturday night dances that took place during the
brief reign of the Hamilton boys and girls. Beulah was more excited
about the barn than it was about Nancy, and she was quite in sympathy
with this view of things, as the entire Carey family, from mother to
Peter, was fairly bewitched with its new toy.
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