"Are you sure you aren't getting too tired, dear?" asked Miss Fletcher of her invalid, doubtfully. "Wouldn't you rather the waitress poured?"
But Flossie declared she was feeling well, and Hazel looked up eagerly into Miss Fletcher's eyes and said, "You know she can't get too tired unless we're doing wrong."
"Oh, indeed!" returned the hostess dryly. "Then there's nothing to fear, for she's doing the rightest kind of right."
When the table was set forth, two small plates heaped high with bread-and-butter sandwiches, a coffee-pot and milk-pitcher of beaten egg and milk, a tea-pot of grape juice, one dish of nuts and another of jelly, the waitress's eyes spoke so eloquently that Flossie mercifully dismissed her on the spot, and invited a lady of her acquaintance to the feast, who immediately drew up a chair with eager alacrity.
Miss Fletcher seated herself again and looked on with the utmost satisfaction, while the children laughed and ate, and when the sandwich plates and coffee-pot and tea-pot and milk-pitcher were all emptied, she replenished them from the well-furnished sideboard.
"My, I wish I was aunt Hazel's real little niece!" exclaimed Flossie, enchanted with pouring from the delightful china.
"So do I wish I was," said Hazel, looking around at her hostess with a smile that was returned.
When Hazel sat down to supper at home that evening, she had plenty to tell of the delightful afternoon, which made Mr. Badger and Hannah open their eyes to the widest, although she did not suspect how she was astonishing them.
"I tell you," she added, in describing the luncheon, "we were careful not to break that little girl's dishes. Oh, I wish you could see them. They're the most be-autiful you ever saw. They're so big—big enough for a child's real ones that she could use herself."
"I judge you did use them," said uncle Dick.