“I might teach something—they say I’m good in English, or I might—why I might cook. Wait until you’ve tried this dinner I want to get up for you and then maybe you can recommend me for a position as cook sometime—oh, now you see you must let us have the dinner.”
“I see it now, of course,” smiled Mr. Huntington. And then a look of real eagerness came over his lonely face. “What day had you—thought of for the festivities?” he asked.
“Oh,” began Peggy thoughtfully, “there are lots of good days for it—any Sunday or—”
Mr. Huntington murmured something, she wasn’t quite sure what. She paused inquiringly. She mustn’t let him know she suggested Sunday, because of its being a proverbially lonely day for people without family or friends, and if he had a different choice—
“Thanksgiving,” he was saying slowly to himself, so low that Peggy could hardly hear him. “Thanksgiving always is a—hard day to get through.”
“Hard! Why, it’s gorgeous! Oh, if we only can get our ice-box principal to let us, I’m sure the girls would love to give the dinner on Thanksgiving. It will give us an opportunity to learn how to fix turkey and cranberry and all those things. We will settle that, then, because I’ll tease my head off when I’m talking to Mrs. Forest—I’ll even kiss her if I have to, and in the end she’ll say ‘Bless you, my children, go and give your party.’”
“And I shall say bless you, too, I shouldn’t wonder,” murmured the old man, with a hint of a smile in his eyes. “It’s been eighteen years since Thanksgiving meant anything in this house. My daughter was here then, with her husband and baby son. But—”
Peggy looked around the dark, gloom-filled interior of the Huntington house and wondered where they were now, the rest of this family, that had cherished Thanksgiving day. But she did not want to ask and hurt Mr. Huntington’s feelings.
“Well,” she assured him eagerly, “we’ll just have a perfectly wonderful party. And I’ll bring my new chafing-dish and Katherine’s percolator and we’ll make the fudge and the coffee ourselves.”
“Fudge is a necessary part of the affair?” the old man smiled questioningly.