“Oh, that means he’s number four in our Rainbow Club. Peggy Burrell is number five and the Captain is number six. That’s all the members we have so far.”
“Aren’t you going to count me in?” asked Barby.
“Oh, you _are_ counted in. You’ve belonged from the beginning. We made you an _honary_ member or whatever it is they call it, people who deserve to belong because they’re always doing nice things, but don’t know it. There’s you and Uncle Darcy and Captain Kidd, because he saved our lives and saved our families from having to have a double funeral.”
Barby stooped to take the little terrier’s head between her hands and pat-a-cake it back and forth with an affectionate caress.
“Captain Kidd,” she said gaily, “you shall have a party this very night, and there shall be bones and cakes on the holiday tree, and you shall be the best man with a ’normous blue bow on your collar, and we’ll all dance around in your honor this way.”
Springing to her feet and holding the terrier’s front paws, she waltzed him around and around on his hind legs, singing:
“All around the barberry bush,
Barberry bush, barberry bush.
All around the barberry bush
So early in the morning.”
Georgina, accustomed all her life to such frisky performances, took it as a matter of course that Barby should give vent to her feelings in the same way that she herself would have done, but Richard stood by, bewildered. It was a revelation to him that anybody’s mother could be so charmingly and unreservedly gay. She seemed more like a big sister than any of the mothers of his acquaintance. He couldn’t remember his own, and while Aunt Letty was always sweet and good to him he couldn’t imagine her waltzing a dog around on its hind legs any more than he could imagine Mrs. Martha Washington doing it.
The holiday tree was another revelation to him, when he came back at dusk to find it lighted with the colored lanterns and blooming with flags and hung with surprises for Georgina and himself.
“You’ve never seen it lighted,” Barby explained, “and Georgina’s birthday had to be skipped because I wasn’t here to celebrate, so we’ve rolled all the holidays into one, for a grand celebration in Captain Kidd’s honor.”