"So that's all right," said Mrs. Red House. "Oh, you dear children, you must stay to lunch, and we'll have a splendid time."
"What a darling Princess you are!" Noël said slowly. "You are a witch Princess, too, with magic powers over the Police."
"It's not a very pretty sort of magic," she said, and she sighed.
"Everything about you is pretty," said Noël. And I could see him beginning to make the faces that always precur his poetry-fits. But before the fit could break out thoroughly the rest of us awoke from our stupor of grateful safeness and began to dance round Mrs. Red House in a ring. And the girls sang—
"The rose is red, the violet's blue,
Carnation's sweet, and so are you,"
over and over again, so we had to join in; though I think "She's a jolly good fellow would have been more manly and less like a poetry book."
Suddenly a known voice broke in on our singing.
"Well!" it said. And we stopped dancing. And there were the other two ladies who had politely walked off when we first discovered Mrs. Red House. And one of them was Mrs. Bax—of all people in the world! And she was smoking a cigarette. So now we knew where the smell of tobacco came from, in the White House.
We said, "Oh!" in one breath, and were silent.
"Is it possible," said Mrs. Bax, "that these are the Sunday-school children I've been living with these three long days?"