Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
Jaquelina
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066151126
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I.
"Jack-we-li-ner!"
A girlish head, "running over with curls," lifted itself from the long orchard grass, and listened—the slender, arched black brows met over the bright, dark eyes in a vexed frown.
The woman who was calling Jaquelina in that loud, shrill, uncultivated voice stood in the doorway of a low, unpainted farm-house, prettily situated on the gentle slope of a green hill at whose foot a silvery little brook ran singing past.
Beyond it was a strip of fertile meadow. Then the ground took a sloping rise again into the orchard now glowing white and red in the flush of its spring-time blossoming.
Under the branches of a wide-spreading apple tree a girl lay at length in the emerald grass and blossoming clover, her curly head bent over a book.
The sunshine sifted down through the fragrant boughs on the soft chestnut locks with a glint of gold in their brownness, and on the arch, pretty face with its soft skin tanned to a clear brune by exposure, and the pouting lips that were tinted with the vivid scarlet of youth and bounding vitality.
"Jack-we-li-ner!" came the loud, elongated scream again.
Jaquelina Meredith sprang up so impatiently that her head struck against a low-bending branch, and a shower of the fragrant apple-blossoms fluttered down into the folds of her faded print dress.
A robin that had been singing in the tree broke off in his warble and stared down at her in round-eyed surprise.
"What now, I wonder?" she said, as she took up her book and her sun-bonnet, and wended her way to the house.
"Hurry up, will you now,