Peggy’s head drooped thoughtfully. The sunlight, glinting down here and there through the dense green of the trees, shone in a little patch of light on her brown-gold hair. She was a vivid little person, with laughing black eyes and cheeks that flared red through their tan. Her brown arms were clasped over her knees now, as she studied the moist, pebbly sand at her feet.
“I’d have made him some coffee,” she said at last, her crooked dimple flickering into view for just an instant.
“No, you wouldn’t,” denied Florence Thomas, “nobody has been in that house to do anything as daring as that for years. There’s a mystery about it, I tell you—and, in spite of story books, nobody likes to probe too deeply into mysteries. Some people even say that a relative of Mr. Huntington’s stole all his money from him and that’s why he has to live so poorly. Yes, there are lots of stories—”
Peggy brushed the crumbs out of her lap serenely.
“How silly,” she said, “as if anybody’s stealing from the poor old man were reason enough why all the rest of the townspeople should stay away from him and leave him poor,” she said. “What has that to do with my making him some coffee? Even if he’d been the one who stole—still I don’t see the application to this particular question,” she concluded.
“Well, there are other tales,” insisted the crestfallen Florence, and, their coffee cups in their hands, the girls gathered around to tell Peggy many harrowing incidents connected with the great house back from the river, and she heard them quietly, piercing slices of bacon with her stick the while.
“Let’s go up and cook him a dinner,” she cried, springing to her feet when they had done. “We are a cooking class, aren’t we, and that’s the best thing we do, isn’t it? And here we go on just preparing all the good things back at school for us to eat ourselves—it seems, well, piggish. Wouldn’t it be lovely to demonstrate our next lesson by bringing all the materials up to Gloomy House and cooking up a big, wonderful dinner, and having it with Mr. Huntington? We can’t give him a million dollars or anything like that, but we can make one day a lot brighter—and, besides, I can’t stand it to think of anyone hungry—will you, girls? What do you say?”
She stood before them, lifting her slim hand for the vote, her eyes shining with eagerness to put her plan at once into execution.
The other girls gasped. Peggy, although she had been with them so short a time, had won a large place in their admiration.
“He wouldn’t let us,” reminded Florence, puckering her forehead thoughtfully. “Didn’t I tell you he’d bite anybody, fairly, that dreamed of trying to offer him charity? Peggy, I believe you’re partly right, though, maybe we could do something, but it would never work that way.”