CHAPTER XV.
DORIS MAKES A PUDDING.
"Seventeen pounds ten! seventeen pounds ten!" mutters Honor to herself, as with paper and pencil in hand and with knitted brows she makes little notes, seated the while on a corner of the kitchen table.
"I wish you wouldn't shake so!" says Doris, who, with sleeves rolled up and in a huge white apron, is in all the agonies of making a steak-pudding. "If you keep on chattering too," she goes on, "I know I shall leave out half the things, and then you'll never consider how you harassed me with those pounds, shillings, and pence; but 'blame it all on to me,' as Bobby says. Let me see, now: have I got everything in? Oh, I know! a little pot in the middle to keep the gravy in. Now, I shall have to move some of the meat again. There! Oh, goodness me! I do hope the crust will be eatable; but I don't suppose it will in the least. It seems brick-bat-ified to me. Well, I've done my best, anyway." And with a prodigious sigh of relief Doris ties the cloth. "Now," she says, "you can go on, Honor; what about this horrid money? I really wish we had lived in the time of the ancient Britons, then we shouldn't have wanted money at all. It is no doubt a very nice thing when one has plenty of it; but when one hasn't!—" Words fail to express Doris's horror of such a situation, and her cast-up eyes and elevated floury hands finish the sentence for her.
"We are not quite so badly off as that," Honor says, returning to the attack. "I was just saying, seventeen pounds ten a quarter. Take five pounds from that—for rent, you know—and it leaves twelve pounds ten. That's not much is it, Doris? If we want to live we shall have to do something to make both ends meet. Hark, there's the door-bell! Who can it be, I wonder?"
In a few seconds Jane appears with the intelligence that she has just ushered the two Mr. Talboys into the drawing-room, having been quite ignorant of the fact that Molly is there, serenely seated on the floor, working away at the chintz covers which she and the other girls are making for some of the shabby old school-room furniture which now has to do-duty for the drawing-room. Molly is arrayed in one of Jane's large aprons, to keep her black frock from soiling the delicate colours of the stuff; and, as usual, when she is busy, her hair is rumpled up in a fashion which is perhaps more becoming than tidy.
"Don't fuss yourself, Honor," says Doris composedly. "Molly will not mind a bit, and I daresay she will explain the situation in some way of her own which will amuse the old gentlemen immensely. Here she comes; now we shall hear."
"Girls!" cries Molly, dancing into the kitchen, "here are the Mr. Talboys. They found me sitting on the floor amongst all the work; and I couldn't get up at first, because my legs were so cramped. So they came and helped me up, and then we all stood and laughed, till I remembered my manners and asked them to sit down. I only just saved Mr. Ben from seating himself on the broken chair, but I rushed up in time and explained that that was only to be looked at. Then I told them Doris was making a pudding, and that you were busy about something, Honor; but that I would come and see if you had finished. What's the matter? Why do you both look at me as if I had been committing high treason?"
"Well, you have in a way," says Doris reprovingly, "talking all that nonsense. Weren't the old gentlemen surprised?"
"Not a bit," answers Molly promptly; "they enjoyed the fun, and I left them chattering away to Daisy and Bobby as if they had known them all their lives. Now, don't stand there, you two, as if you were going to preach me a sermon five miles long; come and see the old gentlemen. They are most anxious to make Doris's acquaintance."
"Yes, that's all very well," says that young lady as she and Honor follow Molly; "but you needn't have said anything about the pudding."