"I presume 'twas," said Alan candidly. "Molly is an awful tease; she gets after me once in a while, so I know. You're snappish, Poll; but you don't keep fussing at a fellow and hitting him when he's down."
They walked on in silence for a few steps. Then Alan remarked, as he looked at her critically,—
"That's a gay little cap, Polly, and suits you first rate. New, isn't it?"
Polly nodded smilingly. Alan's sympathy had smoothed out all the wrinkles in her temper, and she was once more her own merry self, so by the time she went in at the Hapgood house, she was laughing and talking as brightly as if she and Molly had never taken their walk to the bridge.
"Oh, dear!" sighed Jessie, as she glanced down from the window of their room. "Here come Alan and Polly Adams. What a nuisance!"
The two sisters, left to themselves for the morning, had been having a private feast of lemonade and crackers in their own room, where they had been alternately reading and nibbling, for the past hour.
"Why is it a nuisance?" inquired Katharine, getting up to look out of the window, over her sister who was curled up in one of the deep window-seats, regardless of the delicate frost ferns that were thinly scattered over the panes.
"Just see here," replied Jessie, as she stretched out her arm for the pitcher and tilted it expressively, exposing to view a few bare, dry slices of lemon in the bottom. "They'll be sure to come up here, and it's rather shabby not to give them any."
"I'd make some more," said Katharine, pensively surveying the ruins of the feast; "but I put our very last lemon into this, and I can't. Maybe they won't care for any, it's so cold," she added, with an air of relief.
"I'll tell you, put in some more water, and mix it up pretty well," said Jessie hastily, as she heard Alan calling from below. "It was almost too strong before, so it won't be so bad, and we really ought to treat, I think."