“You can’t make soup out of nothing, and there is not a teacupful of stock in the house,” growled Jack.
“Wait and see!” laughed Pam, as she lightly sprang over the ruins at the bottom of the stairs, dodged brown rivulets of soup that meandered along the floor, and darted in at the kitchen door. “Come along, Barbara! England expects, &c.”
“If you had done your duty and looked where you were going, the soup would not have been spilled,” growled Jack, but Pam was too busy to heed him.
Seizing the empty soup saucepan, she half-filled it with hot water from the boiler and set it over the fire. Then she darted to the table, where she stood busily stirring, mixing, and pounding, calling all the time for a succession of things which Barbara was quick to supply. “There, that will do, I think,” she exclaimed in great satisfaction. “Corn flour, tomato powder, salt, pepper—a good lot of that—Worcester sauce, burnt sugar, and a dash of shrimp sauce just by way of piquancy. Very nice to look at, and interesting to taste; not very nourishing, perhaps, but that will not matter for once.”
The hot water was poured on the concoction, the stuff was returned to the saucepan and brought to the boil; then, the ten minutes being up, Pam carried the emergency soup to the dining-room herself, while Barbara collected the fragments of broken earthenware and swabbed up the river of soup with a grubby mop.
“Well, you take the cake, and no mistake about it, in rising to the occasion!” admitted Jack with grudging admiration, as he limped about the kitchen, getting ready for the fish course, and seeing that other things were keeping in a state of readiness.
Pam’s merry laugh rang out. “It is a mercy I can do so much, for it is my fate to be always creating situations that call for dispatch and skill in the managing.”
Jack looked at her in silent wonder. Somehow he always was wondering at Pam. It was barely more than half an hour by the clock since she had been drowned in tears because of that curt letter from Lady Dalby, who had written to say that as she could not have Miss Walsh when she needed her so much, she had secured another governess. Pam’s salary had not been much, but in poverty like theirs every little counts. There was the doctor’s bill for Muriel’s illness, with all the other bills which had sprung from the same source, while winter was coming on. But it was of no use to “grouse” over things, it did not make them the least bit better. So he left off speculating about Pam, and ordered Barbara round in fine style for the next twenty minutes, and the courses of the dinner went up one by one until it was all over.
When coffee had been taken to the drawing-room, Greg and Sid cleared the dinner-table, and then came down to their supper in the breakfast-room, which opened out of the kitchen. Pam, who had rushed upstairs to see if Muriel was comfortably asleep, came hurrying back to help in washing up the silver and glass.
Then, “What is your great idea?” asked Jack, who was seated on a high stool at the table, and was rapidly polishing the spoons and forks which Pam had washed.