"There! I guess that paid her for being so private that she wouldn't tell me a thing about the company that left their house in such a hurry one day last week, and hustled off before daylight at that!"
The cook, still standing with her fat arms akimbo, stared wrathfully at the closed door where the housekeeper had vanished.
"Well, of all the mean things not even telling a decent woman like myself one bit of what's going on there! I'll find out, though, some way. To-morrow is my afternoon off, and I'll go from one end of this town to the other to see what I can hear."
Even little Rose Atherton was pledged to keep the secret.
"We're to have a lovely time at our house," she said to Polly and Sprite, one morning. "We're to have a perfectly lovely time, and you'll be there to enjoy it, but that is all I can tell. Uncle John said I could say that if I wished to but that I musn't tell any more just now."
"Well, we won't mind waiting to hear just what it is," Polly said, "because we know it will be nice, whatever sort of party it is. We always have a nice time at your house."
"And we'll like it all the better because there's to be a surprise of some sort," said Sprite.
"We can wonder and wonder, and then when the day comes we'll have the fun of not guessing what it is, but just knowing what it is and enjoying it."
Rose looked very wise.
"It's to be lovely, I told you that, and there's one thing more I can tell, and that is that it will be different from any party we ever went to, or any party any of us ever had."