Barbara Ladd

Excerpt: ...resolves to be all child again on the morrow, she sobbed herself to sleep, with the thick hair tangled over her eyes and grieving lips. But the long, sweet sleep brought complete renewal to Barbara's spent forces, and waking found her composedly happy, with a blessed sense of problems solved and desired things coming to pass. Her heart was a-brim with sunshine, but the only sunshine in the room was that she held in her heart, for the light that came through the diamond panes was gray, and the sky behind the leafy branch was gray, and, as she looked, the first of the rain came, blown in streaming gusts against the glass, and shedding a narrow line of drops across the polished floor. One leaf of the window was open, and Barbara sprang from bed to shut it, laughing as the cold drops spattered her feet. She had no quarrel with the rain that day, there being enough pleasures indoors to keep any maid's mind busy. After breakfast, however, when she found that Uncle Bob was going down into the village to call on the Reverend Jonathan Sawyer, to drink a glass with Squire Gillig in his snug office behind the store, and to pay his respects to Doctor John and Doctor Jim, then Barbara felt the lure of the rain, and said she would go with him. I love the rain, she explained,