you."

"I suppose," remarked Sarah plaintively, "you're going to scold."

"Not exactly," said her brother, smiling in spite of himself. "But
while I want you to have a happy summer, Sarah, and 'collect' snakes
and bugs and insects to your heart's content, I want you to understand
clearly that the menagerie is to be kept outside of the house. Mother
and Winnie mustn't be expected to get used to finding snakes in boxes
and spiders in bottles, and the place to study a colony of ants is
outside, not in the front hall. If I find you can't remember this one
rule, you'll have to come back to Eastshore and stay with me during the
week."

Sarah, with an unhappy recollection of the furore she had created the
week before when she had bodily transplanted a thriving colony of ants
to the hall rug, promised to remember.

"Jack Welles said he might come up for a couple of weeks and be a hired
man," announced Rosemary, smiling.

"I hope he does," approved the doctor promptly. "He'll find it an
endurance test and a particularly valuable one. Yes, Winnie?"

"I wish you'd step out and look at the canna bed," said Winnie grimly.
"Every single plant pulled out and left dying in the sun."

"Why, I did that," declared Shirley in her clear little voice that
always reminded Winnie of a robin's chirp. "I thought Mother would
want to take the cannas to Rainbow Hill with us--we can plant them
around the porch there."

Doctor Hugh pushed back his chair, his mouth twitching.

"Whatever happens this summer, Winnie," he said gravely, "something
tells me that you won't be bored."

CHAPTER III

RAINBOW HILL

A white clapboarded house with moss-green shutters and a dark oak
"Dutch" door, the upper half of which swung hospitably open--this was
Rainbow Hill in the light of the late June afternoon sun. A little
jewel of a house set in the center of a close-cropped emerald-green
lawn and circled by sturdy old trees, elms and maples that had marked
the site of the old homestead and now guarded the "new house" as it had
been called ever since it had been built six years before to replace
the farmhouse destroyed by fire.

"Welcome to Rainbow Hill," said Mrs. Joseph Hildreth, coming out on the
red tiled walk as a car swept up to the door and stopped.

Mrs. Hildreth, the wife of the tenant farmer, was a young woman with
wide-awake blue eyes and an air of capability that struck terror to the
souls of the lazy. She was known far and