Rainbow Hill

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Doctor Hugh leaned back in his swivel chair and looked anxiously at his mother.

"I don't believe you realize how incessant the noise will be," he urged. "Every morning hammering and sawing and the inevitable shouting and argument that seem to attend all building operations, especially when the job is one of alteration, like this."

"I shall not mind the noise, dear," said Mrs. Willis tranquilly. "Let me see the plans again."

She held out her hand for the blue prints and four interested heads immediately bent above them, Rosemary being tall enough to look over her mother's shoulder and Sarah and Shirley pressing close to her side.

"I don't see how anyone can tell a thing from that," Rosemary complained. "There's nothing but white lines."

The doctor smiled, but his glance was on the frail, almost transparent hands which held the roll of paper flat on the desk.

"I suppose you thought that carpenters worked from photographs of completed interiors, or illustrations in interior-decoration catalogues," he suggested good-naturedly. "You see before you, Rosemary, a most practical conception of two offices and a reception room. Mr. Greggs will rip out one side of the house and add them on as a wing and when the joining is painted over you'll think those rooms were built when the original house was."

"Well—all right," conceded Rosemary, "I suppose Mr. Greggs knows. Anyway, it will be fun to have something going on. Vacation certainly isn't very exciting."

"I want to see them rip the house," announced Sarah with intense satisfaction.

"I think I owe it to Mr. Greggs almost as much as to Mother, to have you at a safe distance before the ripping begins," said Doctor Hugh a little grimly. "Somehow I have the feeling, Sarah, that the best-laid plans of architects may go awry when you're about."

"Huh!" retorted Sarah, abandoning blue prints for her favorite goatskin rug on which she flopped in an attitude more comfortable than graceful.

Shirley, too, wearying of the unfamiliar, turned to the delights of the iron wastebasket into which she tried to wedge her plump self with indifferent success and a great crackling of paper.

Doctor Hugh began to sharpen a pencil with meticulous care, his dark eyes behind their glasses apparently intent on the task in hand. But the more discerning of his patients, and every nurse who had served on his cases, could have told you that Doctor Willis always saw most when he appeared to be quite absorbed.

Even an outsider would have been interested in the group gathered in the young doctor's office that summer afternoon. The little mother (she was no taller than her oldest daughter and came only to her tall son's shoulder) sat at one side of the flat-topped desk, leaning her head on one hand as she studied the plans for the addition to the house. She was very lovely and very appealing, from her wavy dark hair faintly streaked with gray to her little buckled slippers, and there was nothing of the invalid about her. It would have been difficult to say, off-hand, just why she should inspire the conviction, immediate and swift, that those who loved her must be constantly on guard to protect her against physical exhaustion and weakness....