“Oh!” Amanda halted on her way across the lawn. “What time is she coming?” she asked in panicky way, as though she would flee before the visitor arrived.
“Ach, not for long yet! We don’t eat till after five. Martin brings her on the trolley with him when he comes home from the bank.”
“Then I’ll go in to see your mother a while.” A great uneasiness clutched at the girl’s heart. Why had she come on that day?
But Mrs. Landis was glad to see her. “Well, Amanda,” she called through the kitchen screen, “you’re just the person I said I wished would come. Come right in.
“Come in the room a while where it’s cool,” she invited as Amanda and several of the children entered the kitchen. “I’m hot through and through! I just got a short cake mixed and in the stove. Now I got nothin’ special to do till it’s done. I make the old kind yet, the biscuit dough. Does your mom, too?”
“Yes.”
“Ach, it’s better, too, than this sweet kind some people make. I split it and put a lot of strawberries on it and we eat it with cream.”
“Um, Mom,” said little Charlie, “you make my mouth water still when you talk about good things like that. I wish it was supper-time a’ready.”
“And you lookin’ like that!” laughed the mother, pointing to his bare brown legs and feet and his suit that bore evidence of accidental meetings with grass and ground.
“Did they tell you, Amanda,” she went on placidly, as she rocked and fanned herself with a huge palm-leaf fan, “that we’re gettin’ company for supper?”