arc not happy, and I am,” said Merry, pausing to look at Anne
Hathaway’s cottage as she put up the picture, and to wonder if it
was very pleasant to have a famous man for one’s husband.
“I guess your missionarying has done you good; mine has, and I’m
getting to have things my own way more and more every day. Miss
Bat is so amiable, I hardly know her, and father tells her to ask
Miss Molly when she goes to him for orders. Isn’t that fun?”
laughed Molly, in high glee, at the agreeable change. “I like it ever
so much, but I don’t want to stay so all my days. I mean to travel,
and just as soon as I can I shall take Boo and go all round the
world, and see everything,” she added, waving her gay sack, as if it
were the flag she was about to nail to the masthead of her ship.
“Well, I should like to be famous in some way, and have people
admire me very much. I’d like to act, or dance, or sing, or be what I
heard the ladies at Pebbly Beach call a ‘queen of society.’ But I
don’t expect to be anything, and I’m not going to worry I shall not
be a Lucinda, so I ought to be contented and happy all my life,”
said Jill, who was very ambitious in spite of the newly acquired
meekness, which was all the more becoming because her natural
liveliness often broke out like sunshine through a veil of light
clouds.
If the three girls could have looked forward ten years they would
have been surprised to see how different a fate was theirs from the
one each had chosen, and how happy each was in the place she
was called to fill. Merry was not making the old farmhouse pretty,
but living in Italy, with a young sculptor for her husband, and
beauty such as she never dreamed of all about her. Molly was not
travelling round the world, but contentedly keeping house for her
father and still watching over Boo, who was becoming her pride
and joy as well as care. Neither was Jill a famous woman, but a
very happy and useful one, with the two mothers leaning on her as
they grew old, the young men better for her influence over them,
many friends to love and honor her, and a charming home, where
she was queen by right of her cheery spirit, grateful heart, and
unfailing devotion to those who had made her what she was.
If any curious reader, not content with this peep into futurity, asks,
“Did Molly and Jill ever marry?” we must reply, for the sake of
peace–Molly remained a merry spinster all her days, one of the
independent, brave, and busy creatures of whom there is such need
in the world to help take care of other peoples’ wives and children,
and do the many useful jobs that the married folk have no time for.
Jill certainly did wear a white veil on the day she was twenty-five
and called her husband Jack. Further than that we cannot go,
except to say that this leap did not end in a catastrophe, like the
first one they took together.
That day, however, they never dreamed of what was in store for
them, but chattered away as they cleared up the room, and then ran
off ready for play, feeling that they had earned it by work well
done. They found the lads just finishing, with Boo to help by
picking up the windfalls for the cider-heap, after he had amused
himself by putting about a bushel down the various holes old Bun
had left behind him. Jack was risking his neck climbing in the
most dangerous places, while Frank, with a long-handled
apple-picker, nipped off the finest fruit with care, both enjoying
the pleasant task and feeling proud of the handsome red and
yellow piles all about the little orchard. Merry and Molly caught
up baskets and fell to work with all their might, leaving Jill to sit
upon a stool and sort the early apples ready to use at once, looking