Swiftly and silently Peggy went to Katherine and took her hand and, with their fingers on their lips, the two stole to the library door and thence, unnoticed, from the room. A few minutes later they were running down the frosty walk, their eyes happy and their cheeks aglow, and their hearts kept time to their running feet.
“If our mathematics only solved as nicely as that,” Peggy murmured longingly. And Katherine pressed her hand, and they danced along on the sidewalk until the people passing turned wistfully to gaze after them, wondering how it would seem to have such an overflow of spirits that one must run and skip and laugh out loud to express them.
“Let’s have all the girls we can pack into the room in for a midnight celebration,” suggested Katherine as soon as they had flung off their coats in their own room.
“Good girl,” chirruped Peggy. “About ten people—our most special own crowd. Hurry up and be ready for dinner—and is there any butter out on the window ledge?”
Katherine craned her eager head out of the window into the cold. “Not a bit,” she said. “We have a can of condensed milk left, though.”
“Fine,” cried Peggy, counting off on her fingers the butter, the sugar, and the alcohol, the butter, the sugar, and the alcohol—“for I don’t suppose there is any alcohol, is there, friend infant?”
“’Fraid not,” sighed Katherine.
From this an outsider might suppose that the girls were planning to concoct some sort of intoxicating beverage for their innocent little midnight party. But it was only the preliminary preparation for the inevitable fudge. And the alcohol was to run the chafing-dish, and not to go into it.
Just before dinner, Peggy, asparkle in her golden satin, so nearly the color of her lovely hair, went shouting through the corridor, “Alcohol! Al—co—hol!”
And behind the closed doors every girl knew that somewhere there was to be a party and, recognizing the voice, ten of them guessed that they would be invited. It was not until her second trip, however, that her call brought results in the form of an opening door and a nice, full bottle of denatured alcohol generously thrust into her hand by one of the hopeful ten.