CHAPTER VIII.

HIGH VALLEY.


Clover was putting Phil's chamber to rights, and turning it into a
sitting-room for the day, which was always her first task in the morning.
They had been at St. Helen's nearly three weeks now, and the place had
taken on a very homelike appearance. All the books and the photographs
were unpacked, the washstand had vanished behind a screen made of a
three-leaved clothes-frame draped with chintz, while a ruffled cover of
the same gay chintz, on which bunches of crimson and pink geraniums
straggled over a cream-colored ground, gave to the narrow bed the air of a
respectable wide sofa.

"There! those look very nice, I think," she said, giving the last touch to
a bowl full of beautiful garden roses. "How sweet they are!"

"Your young man seems rather clever about roses," remarked Phil, who,
boy-like, dearly loved to tease his sister.

"My young man, as you call him, has a father with a gardener," replied
Clover, calmly; "no very brilliant cleverness is required for that."

In a cordial, kindly place, like St. Helen's, people soon make
acquaintances, and Clover and Phil felt as if they already knew half the
people in the town. Every one had come to see them and deluged them with
flowers, and invitations to dine, to drive, to take tea. Among the rest
came Mr. Thurber Wade, whom Phil was pleased to call Clover's young
man,--the son of a rich New York banker, whose ill-health had brought him