Caroline lifted her eyes from her sewing, and looked. She recognized the car in a single glance. It was the limousine that she had so enjoyed riding in—Aunt Eunice’s own car. It was stopping at the door of the farm. Oh, cried guilty conscience, here was Cousin Penelope—Jacqueline’s Cousin Penelope!—come accusingly, as Caroline had always feared she would come, to tell Caroline what she thought of people who pretended to be other people, and let you be good to them, with dentists and pianos, and all the time were deceiving you!
Caroline dropped Gertrude, so violently that it was well she was not made of anything more breakable than painted cloth and cotton. She caught up Mildred in a frantic clasp.
“You mind the babies, Nellie!” she bade. “I won’t come back till she’s gone, not even if she stays here ten thousand years!”
She scuttled out at the rear of the barn, just as the stately limousine came to rest alongside the kitchen door. She ran round to the south side of the barn, where there was a pile of old lumber, and a disused hen-house. She crawled into the hen-house—she wasn’t very big in the Peggy Janes!—through a hole that looked hardly large enough for a good-sized dog.
It was hot and rather stifling in the hen-house, but Caroline felt as safe as if she were in a diving-bell at the bottom of the sea. She cuddled in a corner and held Mildred tight and comforted her. She was just assuring Mildred that there was nothing to fear, for Cousin Penelope would go away very soon, and then they would crawl out where it was cooler, when she heard steps close at hand, and the rustle of garments among the tall weeds by the lumber pile, and voices.
One voice unmistakably belonged to Cousin Penelope.
“Where can she have vanished to?”
“I bet I know!” That shrill pipe was Nellie’s, the little traitor! “I bet she’s gone and hid in the old hen-house.”
“But she couldn’t possibly have got in there,” gasped Cousin Penelope.
“’Course she could,” insisted Nellie. “Want me to crawl in and show you how?”