Publisher's Synopsis
Lionel Young and his sister, Imogen, set out for the picturesque but remote High Valley in Colorado, leaving their hometown in Devonshire, England behind. Lionel wants to take the share in Geoffrey Templestowe's cattle business. Imogen, owing to her prejudices against America and the American way of life, finds it hard to adjust to life over there. Clover Templestowe, now happily married and living in the High Valley, at first finds it very trying to get on with Imogen. A lot of events ensure in the course of which we meet again with Rose Red, get news from Cousin Helen and of course meet Katy again...It was a morning of late May, and the sunshine, though rather watery, after the fashion of South-of-England suns, was real sunshine still, and glinted and glittered bravely on the dew-soaked fields about Copplestone Grange.This was an ancient house of red brick, dating back to the last half of the sixteenth century, and still bearing testimony in its sturdy bulk to the honest and durable work put upon it by its builders. Not a joist had bent, not a girder started in the long course of its two hundred and odd years of life. The brick-work of its twisted chimney-stacks was intact, and the stone carving over its doorways and window frames; only the immense growth of the ivy on its side walls attested to its age. It takes longer to build ivy five feet thick than many castles, and though new masonry by trick and artifice may be made to look like old, there is no secret known to man by which a plant or tree can be induced to simulate an antiquity which does not rightfully belong to it. Innumerable sparrows and tomtits had built in the thick mats of the old ivy, and their cries and twitters blended in shrill and happy chorus as they flew in and out of their nests.
