Six Girls and the Tea Room E-Book

Marion Ames Taggart

• Herausgeber: Marion Ames Taggart
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Again a story of the Six Girls of whom we are fond, is dedicated to you. It will tell you what delightful things grew out of their Tea Room, and how the "Patty-Pans flat" was filled with happiness till it overflowed into a larger home.

Leseprobe

Six Girls and the Tea Room

By

Marion Ames Taggart

Table of Contents

To Gertrude, amid the mountains:

CHAPTER I. THE PATTY-PANS AGAIN

CHAPTER II. "PLEASED TO MEET YOU"

CHAPTER III. THE CUP THAT CHEERS

CHAPTER IV. CHRISTMAS, AND AN INVITATION

CHAPTER V. "THE HANDSOME MISS ANGELA KEY-STONE"

CHAPTER VI. UP-STAIRS AND DOWN-STAIRS

CHAPTER VII. AN OPEN DOOR

CHAPTER VIII. HARD TRAVELING

CHAPTER IX. AN UNPREJUDICED VIEW

CHAPTER X. "SEEING IS BELIEVING"

CHAPTER XI. THE ELASTIC PATTY-PANS

CHAPTER XII. THE TWO KEREN-HAPPUCHS

CHAPTER XIII. A HINT OF SPRING

CHAPTER XIV. LITTLE SERENA

CHAPTER XV. "'MONGST THE HILLS OF SOMERSET, WISHT I WAS A-ROAMIN' YET!"

CHAPTER XVI. HAPPIE GRANTS AMNESTY

CHAPTER XVII. JONES-DEXTER PRIDE

CHAPTER XVIII. A SIEGESLIED

CHAPTER XIX. PATTY-PANS NO MORE

CHAPTER XX. EAST AND WEST

"THERE WERE EXCITING DAYS, TIRESOME TOO"

To Gertrude,amid the mountains:

Again a story of the Six Girls of whom we are fond, is dedicated to you. It will tell you what delightful things grew out of their Tea Room, and how the "Patty-Pans flat" was filled with happiness till it overflowed into a larger home.

It proves—what you know—that the best times are not always great times. Our Six Girls—and the boys—are busy young folk, and the good things that have come to them they won by courage, perseverance and the merry hearts that are part of innocence and sweetness.

More than all, our Six Girls—and one boy—love one another so dearly that they cannot help being successful and happy. We believe—do we not?—that a loving home alone is a real home.

Margery, Happie, Gretta and Bob know well that "'tis love that makes the world go 'round." They ask love of those who read the story of their Tea Room which brought happiness to so many, in such unforeseen ways. It is the story of a winter, but a winter all sunshine.

Remembering how it was written is it fittingly dedicated to you, dear Gertrude.

CHAPTER I.THE PATTY-PANS AGAIN

"Is this the Patty-Pans?" asked Gretta, setting down the basket that held Jeunesse Dorée, the yellow kitten, and looking around the little dining-room with great interest. And she asked it with her voice up on "Patty," and down on "Pans," because she was a true Pennsylvania country girl.

"This is our city residence, Patty-Pans-on-the-Hudson," said Happie Scollard. "Isn't it beautifully queer, the way we're glad to see anything again? We all were in the dolefullest dumps going to Crestville last April, then we felt dumpy coming away this morning because we'd got so attached to the farm—and it was a risk taking Gretta away from home for the first time! And now we're all as glad to see our dear little Patty-Pan flat as if we hadn't loved the farm, and in the spring we'll be perfectly crazy to see the farm again—and so it goes! Sorry to leave one thing, and just jumping glad to see another!"

Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury, the Scollards' adopted aunt whose unlikely name Happie bore, laughed. "Your 'jumping gladness' is always more in evidence than your regrets, Happie," she said. "Now, my annexed family, I am going home. You can get on without me in your own domain, and I want to see what has happened in mine during these long months of our exile. Margery, Happie, I will come down to-morrow and take you to see the room that I thought would answer for your proposed tea room. There's the bell! Bob and Laura with supplies from the delicatessen shop, likely. Charlotte, go to bed early and rest well to prepare for to-morrow, if you want to resume responsibility. Good-bye, my dears. I wonder how Noah liked parting from his animals!"

She started down the tiny three-foot hall in her brisk way, but Happie rushed after her and threw herself upon this "Noah" into whose Ark of refuge the Scollards had been taken the previous spring. Then the waters of affliction had threatened to submerge them, and their brave little "Charlotte-mother" was in danger of slipping away altogether, broken down by her long struggle to support her six children, as well as to educate them herself.

The Scollards had dubbed Miss Keren-happuch's farm "the Ark," with good reason, for it had preserved them, and their dearest of mothers had come back from it fit to take up her burden again. To be sure, during the nine months they had spent in Crestville the farm had proved to belong rightfully to Gretta Engel, the young girl with whom Happie had made such fast friends and who had now returned with them to share the experiences of a winter that promised to be interesting, but this did not alter nor lessen the Scollards' debt to that fine old gentlewoman, their grandmother's eccentric friend, Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury. She had been indeed their "Noah" who had saved them from destruction, and Happie ran after her at her hint of regret in leaving them, precipitating herself upon her in such wise that it was evident she had lost every bit of her former fear of her name donor. It was lucky that the little hall was but three feet wide, for Miss Keren staggered under the onslaught, though she kissed Happie's glowing cheek as heartily as the girl kissed her pale one.

"I know how the animals felt when they saw Noah walking off, dearest Auntie Keren!" she cried. "They felt like bleating, and as if Shem and Ham and Japhet, and all their wives couldn't console them if Noah hadn't promised to come often to see that they were fed, and to pat their heads and let them lick his hand! You dearest of Auntie Kerens!"

"I hope the original Noah didn't have the bear as spokesman for the rest of the animals!" gasped Miss Keren. "Happie, you are smothering me. There, my dear, let me go! I hear Bob whistling up the stairs, and Laura begging him to go slower. Gretta owns the Ark now. Go and hug her!"

Pretty Margery came out of a room farther down the hall and opened the door to let Miss Keren out and to let in Bob, the one Scollard boy, and Laura, the third girl. She kissed Miss Keren with her gentle, sweet manner, conveying silently her sense of the blessed difference between the circumstances of their return to the flat which Happie had dubbed "the Patty-Pans" and those under which they had closed that front door behind them in the spring to go to Crestville, and her realization that the Scollards owed this betterment to Miss Keren.

Bob and Laura came in with arms filled with packages, most of which had to be carried so perfectly right side up that Laura's face was one pucker of solicitude.

Penny—Penelope, the baby,—had been vainly trying to unfasten the cords holding down the cover of Jeunesse Dorée's basket, stimulated by his imploring mews. Polly had been conducting Gretta through the flat, which struck the girl, for the first time entering a domicile other than the Crestville farmhouses, as a sort of miracle for which previous descriptions had not prepared her mind.

"No wonder Happie called it 'the Patty-Pans,'" said Gretta, as they arrived at the parlor window through a series of telescopic rooms. "It goes on, one room after another, just for all the world like such sheets of baking tins! And are there many like this in this one house?"

Polly felt delightfully experienced, at ten, beside tall Gretta of fifteen, who did not know flats.

"There are two on each floor, and this house is six stories high; this is the fourth floor, east. The Gordons—Ralph and Snigs, you know,—are just across from us, fourth floor, west. That makes twelve flats in one house," she explained carefully. "I guess they're all rented; they generally are in December, like this. They're the nicest flats for this rent mamma saw. You have to have ref'runces to get in, and mamma wouldn't like to leave us alone all day when she's gone to take charge of foreign letters for that firm down in town 'less we were in a house where they were strict about ref'runces." Polly—Mary, but no one called her that,—was a most reliable, painstaking, plump little person, and she intended to go on enlightening Gretta as to the peculiarities of flats, when there came a horrible sound of ripping, tearing, pounding, thumping, that made Gretta jump half way across the little room and then lean against the wall holding both hands to her throat, her pretty face utterly stripped of its rich color, her big eyes bigger and darker than ever as she panted: "Wh-what's that?"

Polly dropped into the nearest chair and laughed so hard that for a minute she could not speak. Before she caught her breath Happie came in and joined in Polly's mirth as she saw Gretta's face and heard the frightful racket which was keeping on as loud as ever.

"You thought we were going straight up through the roof, didn't you, Gretta?" she cried. "I don't blame you, but it's only the steam heat coming on. It has been turned off so long that the pipes were full of water, and when the pipes are cold it always goes on like that. It isn't half so nice as our fireplace and the logs up at Crestville, is it? But it's safe. Come out, both of you, and help get lunch first and then eat it. What do you think? Dorée went right under the sink the minute he was let out, and looked for his pan of milk where it sat last winter! Who would have supposed he would remember? He was nothing but a kitten when we went away."

She had wound her arm around Gretta and had related Dorée's proof of memory as they went down the hall. Her telescopic home looked very pretty to Happie and she could not help being glad to be back to her old life, but it was such a new life to Gretta that she was afraid of her not liking it. She was most anxious that the girl whom she loved and who had never tasted happiness, should spend every day in New York in entire content.

Margery and Laura had the table set when Happie and Gretta arrived on the scene. Bob saluted them waving a thin wooden dish with tinned corners from which he had just emptied the delicatessen-shop potato salad.

"You might run out to the pump and fetch some water, Gretta," he suggested. But Gretta shook her head.

"Come now, I'm not as bad as that!" she cried. "They have water running from spigots up in the mountain hotels, and I've seen it! And I shall not blow out the gas, either!"

"Happie told you!" said Bob. "Don't you put on airs, Gretta! Mother, lady mother, come forth and regale yourself."

Mrs. Scollard hastened to accept this invitation. She patted Penny's plump, country-browned little hand, as Margery lifted her into the high chair at her mother's side. She was a pretty mother—Margery was like her—and young still; it was no wonder that her children dropped into their old places around the table beaming with happiness at seeing her once more at its head, all her old look of weakness and weariness blown away somewhere beyond the Crestville mountains.

The hastily prepared lunch tasted very good and everybody was doing full justice to it, when there came a pounding from the direction of the little kitchen, which made Gretta drop her fork to cry: "What's that?" and sent Bob flying towards it with a partly articulate exclamation of: "Ralph and Snigs!"

"They always pound with a stick from their dumb-waiter door on ours, and then we go to the door—the front door—and let them in," explained Polly, in her rôle of instructress to Gretta.

This time such informality was not to obtain, however. Bob came back with a broad grin on his face and a note in his hand.

"They weren't there when I got there; they must have pounded, and then dropped on the floor when they heard me coming," he said to his family. "This note was pinned on our dumb-waiter door with a skewer."

He proceeded to unfold the note and read: "Mr. Ralph Gordon, Mr. Charles (alias Snigs) Gordon, present their compliments to Mrs. Charlotte Scollard, Miss Scollard, the Misses Keren-happuch, Laura, Mary and Penelope Scollard, Miss Gretta Engel and Mr. Robert Scollard, and request the pleasure of being allowed to call upon them at their earliest convenience. R. S. V. P."

Considering that the Gordon boys had been spending Thanksgiving at the farm, and had come down from it with the Scollards that very morning of the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, it really did not seem as if this formal note, nor even this pressing haste to see the family in the opposite flat, was necessary. Bob crumpled up the note, thrust it into his pocket and dashed out into the hall, where he beat a lively tattoo on the door across from the Patty-Pans' entrance, forgetting all about the rule of consideration for people above and below them, and crying: "Come on over now, you chumps! Come on over!"

Ralph and Snigs appeared, dodged Bob's affectionate blows, and came beaming into the dining-room where they shook hands all around with the Scollards from whom they had parted hardly an hour before, when they had all arrived from the train.

"Glad to see you back!" cried Ralph heartily. "How well you're looking, all of you! I hear that you have been making a long summer of it up in Madison County, Pennsylvania, among the mountains. Evidently it agreed with you. I mean to take a run up in that part of the country myself one of these days. Is this Miss Engel, whose discovery of her grandmother's will, in the horse-hair trunk where her step-grandfather had hidden it, resulted in her snatching from Miss Bradbury the farm which you called the Ark? Very glad to see you, Miss Engel. I don't remember meeting an heiress before. You ought to have prevented your grandmother from marrying a scamp for a second husband. It's wrong to be reckless with grandmothers!"

"The farm isn't worth enough to call me an heiress, Mr. Gordon. I wish you could have come up to see us this summer," retorted Gretta. Which, considering how she and Ralph had chased calves, made hay, and looked after Don Dolor, the horse, together, proved that Gretta was learning how to talk nonsense with these new friends.

"Gretta's grandmother married again before she was born, Ralph," said Polly, who always set everybody right.

"My souls and uppers, Ralph, but you are long winded! You'd better take to the law where you can use your gift of gab!" exclaimed Bob.

"Say, it was fine being up there in the Ark, but I'm mighty glad you're all back here again!" said Snigs, looking around the room and the Scollard circle in profound satisfaction. "Mother says if you could know how glad she was to get you back you'd be ashamed of having left her alone on the other side."

"No we wouldn't, because if we hadn't gone she wouldn't have been so happy now," cried Happie. "Where's Whoop-la?"

"Oh, cut back and fetch Whoop-la!" Ralph ordered his junior. And Snigs hurried off, quickly returning with the Gordon tiger cat, grown big, at whom Dorée set up every hair inhospitably.

"Aunt Keren is coming to fetch us to see the future tea room to-morrow, Ralph," said Margery, bringing her mother a cup of hot tea and passing the crackers and cheese to the boys. "I am half afraid, now that the experiment is to be experimented."

"Always heard tea was bad for the nerves," said Ralph, deftly catching a bit of Neuchâtel cheese which was about to drop, on the edge of the cracker which it was meant to supplement. "What are you afraid of? You'll have a tea room that would make a Russian enlist in the Japanese army, and you'll coin money—like a counterfeiter."

"Counterfeit Japanese?" suggested Happie. "I'm not much afraid of the tea room—though I might be of the tea! As long as I don't have to drink it I won't be afraid of that either. But it does seem rather awesome to think of Margery and me running a tea room, with only Gretta and Laura to help, and mother down in town all day, superintending a foreign firm's big correspondence—I mean a big firm's foreign correspondence—and Bob in Mr. Felton's office again, and you boys at school, and nobody to fall back on till night, no matter what happened!"

"It didn't seem possible," began Laura in her pompous way, "that we could make our dream of the tea room a reality, until now. But with us back in town and Aunt Keren coming to-morrow to get our approval of the room it is almost un fait accompli."

"Let's see, that means an accomplice of fate, doesn't it, Laura?" inquired Bob slyly. He never lost a chance of pricking the bubble of Laura's vanity. "I've not a doubt that the tea room will prove an accomplice of fate." He jumped up and mounted a chair with no warning of his intentions. "My brethren, and also my sisteren," he preached in a sermonizing voice. "This is a world in which one thing leads to another. It has not been my lot to journey far in this round planet, nor has it been my lot to see that it is round. I have been limited to a flatness that extended as far as my eye could reach. But I know—because Columbus proved it by smashing the end of an egg—that could my eye but go on and on it would soon roll over the declining edge of a rotund world. And so I know, although my sweet sixteen years have not carried me to the depths of human experience, that the world of each of us is also a round world, in which events roll around and around, much like the careless kitten that flitteth in circles after its coy tail. And even, my brethren and sisteren, as the flitting of the kitten causes the tail it pursues to circle, so do we, unknowingly, cause the events which seem to chase us. I have no doubt that Sister Laura has spoken as truly as she has spoken beautifully when, in the language of the polite successors of the ancient Gauls, she has said that the tea room would prove an accomplice of fate. Even as the drops of tea flow from the noses of the small teapots of the future refreshment room, so shall the consequences of that room's existence flow through the lives of our beloved sisters Margaret and Keren-happuch, and possibly of others unknown to us."

Gretta groaned, after the fashion of congregations assembled in the old-time camp meetings in the woods, which she had seen when she was very small. Ralph and Snigs were about to applaud, but Happie checked them with a stern face as Bob descended from his chair. "Hush, you never applaud a sermon!" she whispered. "The congregation will join me in the hymn."

She began to sing, and Margery joined with an alto and Laura with a tenor, as if the "hymn" were already familiar. It was sung to the air which has been called, "Tell Aunt Rhody," and its words ran thus:

"A word of wisdom, a word of wisdom, a word of wisdom is of use.This word is come, this word is come, this word is come from a goose."

Ralph and Snigs shouted. "You are the greatest crowd!" exclaimed Ralph admiringly. "You are always springing something new on us. I never heard this sermon racket before. If I ought to be a lawyer, you ought to preach, Bob. And where did you catch the hymn?"

"Bob used to preach when we were little, and we wanted a hymn to sing at his sermons. We didn't dare sing a real hymn, for fear it would be irreverent, so mother wrote the words of this one for us. We hope that it will be a benefit to you," said Happie demurely.

Polly came in from the kitchen looking guilty. "Whoop-la jumped on the table and took the rest of the sardines," she said. "So I gave them, even half and half, to him and Dorée. I didn't like to tell you for fear Ralph would scold Whoop-la. But it was good he stole—took them, for it made Dorée stop growling at him. There was one tail, with a little piece above it, that didn't come out even after I divided, so I gave that to Whoop-la because he was company. I hope you won't say anything to him about it."

Polly was the champion of all animals, and she was Ralph's great friend. The big boy put his arm around her affectionately. "I'll call sardines 'herrings' before Whoop-la from this very day, for fear of embarrassing him, Sweet P.," he said.

The bell rang and Snigs cried, "That's mother, I'll wager what you like."

Penny ran to open the door, and Mrs. Gordon's voice called out: "I missed my boys and felt sure where to find them. May I come?"

Mrs. Scollard hastened out to meet her guest, and Margery, Happie and Gretta fell to clearing the table and washing dishes as fast as they could.

"It's a good thing I lived with you in the country before we came in town, or I never should have got used to your ways. And even now you seem different here, though I can't tell how," Gretta said to Happie as they removed the crumbs from the table.

"Of course; we're in a different state! Isn't this New York and wasn't that Pennsylvania?" inquired Happie. "Nonsense, Gretta; we're just the same, only more so."

"Don't you dread that tea room, honest?" asked Gretta.

"Just a wee bit, but don't you say I said so," returned Happie. "If we can make it go and be useful it will be beautiful. The only thing I really dread about it is its failing."

It had been partly Gretta's plan, at least she had suggested and added to Margery and Happie's idea of a tea room, in which they were to try to make a little of the money they needed that winter. Kind Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury had promised to guarantee their rent and had found the room for the purpose. To-morrow she was going to show it to them. It did seem formidable, now that it was taking such definite shape, the plan of setting up the library and tea room which they had discussed in far-off Crestville. But the Mrs. Stewart from whom they would rent the room was to be above them, with her dancing school, to chaperon them, and perhaps their youth would make the little enterprise go the better. At least it was not Happie's way to be timorous.

"Of course I'm not really afraid, Gretta," she said, with the little toss of her bright red-brown hair which Gretta knew and loved. And she led the way into the tiny kitchen of the flat like an amazon at the head of her warriors.

CHAPTER II."PLEASED TO MEET YOU"

No one had ever known Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury to miss an appointment.

The four girls were ready for her betimes, for she never kept any one waiting and had the strongest objection to unpunctuality in another.

She rang the bell of the small apartment ten minutes earlier than the Scollards had looked for her, and appeared erect and brisk as ever, with that combination of thorough breeding and disregard for externals which was peculiar to herself.

This time, however, it seemed that Miss Bradbury had passed her own limit of garments which, however fine and costly in their day, were stamped with the fact that their day had been marked on a calendar long superseded.

"My children, I'm a frump!" she announced on entering, without other greeting. "I am sure that you will be ashamed to be seen with me. I should have made our investigating day a later one, and got myself clad in the garments of the present year of grace first of all things. Do look at this coat! Its sleeves cry aloud, like the great-mouthed trombones they resemble, that they were made two years ago. One's sleeves always turn traitor and betray one! My coat is not so bad, except the sleeves. Will you mind seriously? And will you promise to walk one on each side of me, pressed close every minute, so no one can see how disgraceful I am? I look as though I had indeed come out of the Ark yesterday!"

"You always look like a dear, old-fashioned gentlewoman, Aunt Keren," said Margery, sincerely and affectionately.

"It's beautiful cloth, Auntie Keren; it hasn't lost its gloss one bit," Happie added consolingly. The Scollards were under the impression that Miss Bradbury's obsolete effect was not a matter of choice, that she had too little money to discard good garments merely because they were out of fashion.

"There's one thing: you don't outgrow your things now!"

"Literally and physically?" cried Miss Keren-happuch. "Why should I? Surely there ought to be some compensation in being beyond the sixtieth goal!"

"But we do," insisted Happie. "We are worse in our last winter's coats than you are in yours. Your sleeves are behind the times, but ours are above our wrists, Margery's and mine. Laura is safe because she inherits. We were wishing for frilled muffs when you came."

"And I think it would be more sensible to wish for new coats," Polly added.

"Such as we are we must get under way. Those who know us will know we have been rusticating, and the other four millions, more or less, won't care," said Miss Bradbury turning towards the door. "Are Polly and Penny to be safely left alone? We may not get back to luncheon."

"Mrs. Gordon promised to keep her eye on them," said Margery, stooping to kiss her two little sisters good-bye.

How noisy, bewilderingly noisy, crowded and unclean the streets of the great city seemed to Margery and Happie after the wind-swept spaces, the deep silence of the mountains! Gretta did not see them in detail. She walked them clutching Happie's arm, her one idea to thread safely between trolleys, trucks, automobiles and all the other monsters that charged down upon her, to which Margery and Happie seemed recklessly indifferent, and Miss Bradbury and Laura, each in her different way, horribly oblivious.

"Oh, Auntie Keren, it isn't here, is it?" cried Happie, as Miss Bradbury turned into a most desirable street, close to the shopping district and between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. She had steadily refused to tell the girls where she had found the place she thought would be best for the proposed tea room. This neighborhood took their breath away. It was so dismaying, yet so very desirable!

"We never could pay the rent of a room near here, Aunt Keren," said Margery.

"Higher rents mean more business, my novices in the Art of Getting Rich!" said Miss Bradbury keeping on her unruffled way. "This block is my judgment for you; we will talk it over afterwards. If the rent is not forth-coming at first, you understand that I am responsible for it. If the tea room really amounts to anything it will be likely to pay more than rent here. Elsewhere, I doubt it would get beyond making its own lower rent. Do you see that house with the square bow window, like a shop, but close curtained with green sash curtains? That is Mrs. Stewart's dancing school, and she is anxious to sub-let the shop on the lower floor. She will give it to you at a reasonable figure, and it has the great advantage of being under the rooms which she uses, where you can have the benefit of the dear little woman's advice and chaperonage. I have known Mrs. Stewart for a long time, admiring her and pitying her with all my heart. Here we are!"

A curtained door led down three steps into the shop, but Miss Bradbury rang the house bell and a maid admitted her, with the four girls in her train, into the hall and into a reception-room at its rear.

A little lady with a charming face, who moved with the rhythm of a poem, came swiftly into the room to greet the arrivals.

"Oh, I hope you'll like the little shop!" she cried girlishly, giving Margery a quick glance of admiration that instantly included handsome Gretta and Happie, with her irregular, attractive face. "It never was used as a shop. I am its first tenant and I used it for dancing classes until I decided that the children were better kept altogether on the first floor—this would be a basement shop, you know, if the house were quite normal."

"Then you are not dismayed by the apparition of such youthful tenants?" suggested Miss Keren. "Margery, this girl, will keep her eighteenth birthday sooner than she would if she realized the penalties of being grown up. Happie, my unfortunate namesake, is fifteen, Laura is thirteen—but she is not a responsible person, only an assistant in the project, as is Gretta, this Pennsylvania girl of ours who has turned out the real owner of my farm—I mean the farm that I thought I owned. Then, little Madam Terpsichore, will you let us see the room?"

"Yes, indeed," agreed Mrs. Stewart, leading the way. She opened the door upon a large room, bare of all furniture except a piano, and a few chairs neatly piled one upon another as if they had been arrested in playing leap frog.

The woodwork of the room was white, panelled in green; there was about it great cheerfulness and suggestions of all sorts of possibilities. The girls looked at one another with bright, excited eyes.

"You like it," Miss Keren stated, not needing to ask.

"We love it, Aunt Keren—if we can afford to," said Happie whimsically.

"Love does not count cost," said Miss Keren. "Mrs. Stewart and I mapped out the general lay of the land—your kingdom—thus: a curtain across here, partly drawn, to cut off some of the light at the rear and allow lanterns where you serve tea on small tables. A gas stove here—tapping this pipe and hidden by a screen. On this, water perpetually boiling. A dresser here, also hidden as you see,—the screen would cut off this entire corner,—for teacups, cakes and all that sort of thing. Around the front, book-shelves, if you decide to add a circulating library to your tea room, as you planned at first to do. And possibly tables here, too, if necessary—candies? Happie, your fudge could be a feature. With hangings, touches of color wisely bestowed, and a little planning, this could be made a delightful room, Mrs. Stewart and I think. But I don't want to bias you."

"It would be perfect, Aunt Keren," said Margery. "No one could help liking it. And the street—there isn't a better location in town, of course. If you think we may risk it. You see, we never had anything so important to decide, and it is hard to settle even less things without mother. You must decide for us. Only—please, Auntie Keren dear, don't reckon on your supplying deficiencies of rent. It would be bad enough if you had to do it! So don't risk anything, counting on stepping in, will you?"

"Yes, and you know we are going to do this seriously, as a business. I'm sure it will be more fun than anything we ever did in all our lives, but if it were only that, we ought to be at home scrubbing," Happie supplemented her sister, leaving to her hearers the application of her remarks.

"Well, my girls, I truly think that your chance of success is greater here than elsewhere, warranting a little more rent. It isn't much more. Mrs. Stewart is most modest in her views. I think it is decided, Mrs. Stewart!" said Miss Keren.

"You will take it, Miss Scollard?" asked Mrs. Stewart.

"If Aunt Keren says I may," assented Margery, after a glance at Happie, who nodded hard.

"Then I shall ask the first favor," Mrs. Stewart said. "That piano! I have another up-stairs which I use for classes. This is a particularly good one, and my young pianist has the true dancing school heaviness of touch. Would you find it in your way to let this piano stand here—for a while?"

Laura, whom nobody had consulted, and who, with Gretta, had played the rôle of listener to the discussion of taking the room, suddenly spoke.

"If I may play on it sometimes," she said. "I was just wishing it could be here so I might play to people taking tea in the shadow with lanterns lighting them."

Gretta looked distinctly shocked and Happie flushed, while Margery's mortification was easily seen. But Mrs. Stewart was evidently acquainted with the artistic temperament. She laughed and asked:

"Then you play, my dear?"

"I compose," said Laura. "I think soft music would add heaps to the tea room."

"Soft music with weak tea, loud music with strong tea. Do come along, Laura!" cried Happie, who, however proud she really was of her genuinely gifted junior, was perpetually wishing "she wouldn't!"

Then, fearing that she had seemed pert, Happie turned back to Mrs. Stewart. "Laura plays well enough for us to enjoy her music a great deal. She meant that she would like to play a little on that piano, if you weren't afraid of her hurting it, but she didn't mean that it couldn't stay down here if you were afraid, though what she said sounded like that. Of course it will not be in the way; it will make the tea room ever so much more like a livable room, even though the piano is locked."

"Which it certainly will never be," smiled Mrs. Stewart. "Perhaps your Laura will let me steal down sometimes to listen to her music."

"Perhaps she can help you sometimes, playing for your classes," said Margery, anxiously supplementing Happie's effort to cover Laura's conceit and the glum expression with which the latter silently recognized this effort.

"We shall have the nicest sort of times, in all sorts of ways, I am sure," said the girls' attractive little landlady. And Miss Bradbury led the new tenants away without their giving a thought to the fact that they did not know what their rent was to be, nor to the wholly unbusinesslike tone of the entire interview.

Miss Bradbury had taken the dimensions of the shop, a prevision which had hot occurred to Margery or Happie, so while the party lunched animatedly in the big hotel nearest to the future tea room, and while Gretta lost herself completely in the music of the first good string orchestra she had ever heard, the plans for the arrangement of the tea room were decided.

After lunch Miss Bradbury departed in search of the carpenter who was to put up book-shelves and portière poles, and the girls went home to relieve trusty Polly of her housekeeping.

Margery found a letter waiting for her, a letter with the Baltimore postmark and addressed in the fine writing which Happie always regarded with aversion. Margery carried the letter with her to their room, whither she went to lay off hat and coat, and Happie groaned to Gretta, a careful groan, in a low key, so Margery should not hear.

"That Robert Gaston will be turning up in New York this winter, mark my words!" she darkly prophesied. "I don't believe in friends!"

Gretta laughed. "How about Ralph and Snigs?" she suggested.

"Boys, just boys!" said Happie. "But I don't believe in elegant young men friends who read aloud to you, the way Margery says this Baltimore creature did at Bar Harbor last summer, and are six years older than you! Of course you know as well as I do how such things always turn out, and Margery is so perfectly lovely that a blind-deaf-feeble-minded man would fall in love with her! It's no joke to see your dearest sister in danger, Gretta."

Happie's voice was so tremulous at the end of this speech that it took away from Gretta the desire to laugh, with which she had struggled as she listened. "We'll just have to hope he isn't blind, deaf and feeble-minded, then maybe he won't fall in love with her, and maybe if he is all these things she won't care about him," Gretta said comfortingly, with considerable show of probability. "And if worst comes to worst, why we'll know it won't be as bad a worst as it looks coming. Don't worry, Happie, it's not your way."

"No," Happie agreed dismally. "But I'm certain he is horrid, wears serious, too-well-fitting clothes, quotes poetry, talks elegantly, and only smiles as if he were trying to be kind. Ug-gh, but I do de-spise that sort of man!"

"I never saw one," said Gretta.

Happie stared at her thoughtfully for an instant, then she burst out laughing, her face all wrinkling into fun-lines, and dimpling with one of those sudden changes of mood that made Happie so lovable.

"Why, neither did I, Gretta, now you speak of it!" she cried. "I think I got him out of stories. I guess I'm a goose."

Margery reappeared, unchanged by this letter at least, so Happie put menacing Robert Gaston out of her mind, and the Scollards talked tea room until their mother and Bob came home, when they talked it more than ever, and after dinner Ralph and Snigs came in, which multiplied the tea-room talk by two.

There were exciting days, tiresome days too, included in the next two weeks. Miss Bradbury hurried the preparations of the room in order to let the girls have some of the benefit of the holiday shopping-time. They were delightful days of selection of materials for hangings, picking out teacups, spoons, dear little chunky Japanese teapots, sugar bowls and cream jugs and pretty plates. They were made by the artistic Japanese in such good designs and colors that only when one turned them over and saw the quality of the ware did one realize that they were picked up on one of the tables at Mardine's where tempting Japanese knickknacks play a sort of progressive game of their own, from the fifteen cent table up to the dollar one, after which they retire to the shelves as winners.

The Patty-Pans undeniably suffered from neglect on the part of its good housekeepers, and Mrs. Scollard and Bob patiently accepted what Bob called "imitation dinners." The girls took turns in seeing after the tea room arrangements, until Gretta volunteered to let Margery and Happie both go while she looked after the housekeeping, and then it went better.

The tea room was to be opened on Saturday, the fifteenth. Ralph and Snigs were not allowed to see it until it was in order, save for the finishing touches, and for these the Scollards and the Gordons made a bee on Wednesday night.

They went down in high feather, Mrs. Gordon and her two tall boys, all the Scollards, including even Penny, while Miss Bradbury was to come down to meet them at the room.

Margery carried the key. She proudly put it into their own lock and opened the door. Happie sprang forward and touched the electric button, and light leaped joyously into each glass bulb, most of which were transformed by crêpe tissue paper into blossoms of unclassified varieties.

Cases stood around, which the bee party had come to open, but in spite of them the room was already beautiful.

"Miss Keren!" expostulated Mrs. Scollard, realizing at a glance what an outlay was represented by the tables, chairs, portières, and lanterns, not to mention the contents of the still unopened cases.

"Charlotte, be still!" warned Miss Keren. "Was I not your mother's closest friend, bound to her by ties of peculiar tenderness? And am I not spiritually kinless? I have told you before that you are not to remonstrate if it is my whim to play with my old friends' grandchildren, and, I won't have you spoiling 'we girls'' fun by a look! Bless their hearts, they have no idea of money. Don't you hint of it!"

Miss Keren's law was laid down rapidly in a low voice, covered by Ralph's salutation of the tea room.