Robinetta by Kate Douglas Wiggin — Read

Young Mrs. Loring thought she had never taken so long a drive as that from the Weston railway station to Stoke Revel. The way stretched through narrow winding roads, always up hill, always between high Devonshire hedges. The rain-soaked lanes were slippery and she was unpleasantly conscious of the size and weight of the American wardrobe trunk that reared its mighty frame in front of her almost to the blotting-out of the driver, who steadied it with one hand as he plied the whip with the other. It struck her humorously that the trunk was larger than most of the cottages they were passing.

It was a late spring that year in England, -- Robinette was a new-comer and did not know that England runs to late and wet springs, believing that they make more conversation than early, fine ones, -- and the trees were just bursting into leaf. The sun had not shone for three days and the landscape, for all its beautiful greenness, looked gloomy to an eye accustomed to a good deal of crude sunshine.