At last, it looked to everybody as if the long-deferred dinner party were actually to take place. There, in readiness, were the girls, the money, the cottage, and Mr. Black, and nothing had happened to Mrs. Bartholomew Crane—who might easily, as Mabel suggested harrowingly, have moved away or died at any moment during the summer.
One day, very soon after the cottage was settled, a not-at-all-surprised Mr. Black and a very-much-astonished Mrs. Crane each received a formal invitation to dine under its reshingled roof. Composed by all four, the note was written by Jean, whose writing and spelling all conceded to be better than the combined efforts of the other three. Bettie delivered the notes with her own hand, two days before the event, and on the morning of the party she went a second time to each house to make certain that neither of the expected guests had forgotten the date.
"Forget!" exclaimed Mr. Black, standing framed in his own doorway. "My dear little girl, how could I forget, when I've been saving room for that dinner ever since early last spring? Nothing, I assure you, could keep me away or even delay me. I have eaten a very light breakfast, I shall go entirely without luncheon—"
"I wouldn't do that," warned Bettie. "You see it's our first dinner party and something might go wrong. The soup might scorch—"
"It wouldn't have the heart to," said Mr. Black. "No soup could be so unkind."
Of course the cottage was the busiest place imaginable during the days immediately preceding the dinner party. The girls had made elaborate plans and their pockets fairly bulged with lists of things that they were to be sure to remember and not on any account to forget. Then the time came for them to begin to do all the things that they had planned to do, and the cottage hummed like a hive of bees.
First the precious seven dollars and a half, swelled by some mysterious process to seven dollars and fifty-seven cents, had to be withdrawn from the bank, the most imposing building in town with its almost oppressive air of formal dignity. The rather diffident girls went in a body to get the money and looked with astonishment at the extra pennies.
"That's the interest," explained the cashier, noting with quiet amusement the puzzled faces.
"Oh," said Jean, "we've had that in school, but this is the first time we've ever seen any."
"We didn't suppose," supplemented Bettie, "that interest was real money. I thought it was something like those x-plus-y things that the boys have in algebra."