The party was almost as wonderful as Caroline expected it to be, so you may judge for yourself that it was a very wonderful party indeed. The caterer way down in Boston didn’t forget to send the ices and the cakes, as Caroline in a private agony had feared that he might, and Frank didn’t puncture a tire or run into a ditch when he fetched them from the train at Baring Junction. Eleanor Trowbridge, the little girl next door, didn’t come down with rash, as a subterranean rumor said that she was coming, and Judge Holden’s youngest granddaughter didn’t go into a tantrum and throw things, as she did (according to gossipy Sallie) to the serious disturbance of little Patty Wheeler’s Fourth of July party.
Caroline wore a frock (Jacqueline’s frock!) the color of creamy honeysuckle, hand-made and hem-stitched, with two rosettes of narrow black velvet ribbon and gold tissue at the high waist line. Her guests fluttered crisply in lavender and pale blue, shell pink and lemon yellow. It was as if the posy bed had come alive and found sweet, shrill voices in which to talk and laugh and call across the scented spaces.
They hunted peanuts, and they played at grace-hoops and ring-toss on the lawn, where the shadows grew longer with the passing hours. Everybody won a prize at something. They sat at the flower-decked table, and ate the tiniest buttered rolls and creamed chicken in little shells of pastry, ices that were so lovely Caroline wished she could keep hers forever, and cakes so good to the eye and the taste that they just bewitched you into taking another and another.
Then they played again among the shrubbery, hide and seek, and run, sheep, run! You see, they all felt very well acquainted now. They were much noisier than they had been before the refreshments, and the youngest Holden began to show off and turn cart wheels.
“Our little girl has really the sweetest manners of them all,” said Aunt Eunice, as she looked down on the games from the shaded porch.
“She has more than manners,” Cousin Penelope answered. “She has manner. But of course,” she added proudly, “blood will always tell.”
The nicest party that ever was, the seven little girls said, when they bade Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope and Caroline good-night and asked Caroline to come soon and play with them. But in Longmeadow annals that red-letter day of Caroline’s life was to be remembered, not as the date of Mrs. William Gildersleeve’s grandniece’s party, but as the date of the worst tempest that had swept through the township in years.
“Jacqueline! It’s I. Cousin Penelope. Don’t be frightened.”
Caroline waked in her bed just as a great cart-load of rocks—or so it seemed to her—was dumped upon the roof. She could see the furniture, the hangings, the very pictures on the walls ghastly and unfamiliar in the glare of what must be a gigantic searchlight, which was shut off suddenly and left the room in smothery, thick blackness.