“Yes! Yes!” cried several of the girls at once.
“I haven’t,” said Daisy, after a pause. “I never even wrote!”
“Well, of course nobody wanted you to!” said Marjorie, with assurance. “Your mother certainly has enough to worry about.”
“I thought no one would mind,” replied the other girl, quietly.
Marjorie passed the next three days in feverish excitement, always on the alert to spy a messenger the minute he should arrive with the radio. But no one came, and she found it difficult not only to restrain her own impatience, but to keep the girls from blurting out the secret. On the morning of the party, she gathered the scouts together in her cabin.
“We must go about our preparations for the party just the same,” she told them, “and maybe it will come during the day. Mrs. Hilton is going to shut off the living room, and make the people use the back door all afternoon, so that we can decorate. So, if anybody wants to go riding, she had better go this morning!”
The girls accepted their lieutenant’s advice as they accepted everything else she said and did—without question; and fell to work at their appointed tasks. Florence and Alice made the ice cream; Lily and Mae decorated the room with flowers, and crêpe paper which Mrs. Andrews had sent from New York; Ethel and Doris unpacked boxes of food, and Marjorie and Daisy arranged the dishes on the refreshment table at the side.
“Let’s see how many of us there are,” said Marjorie, as she was putting the silver on the table—“eight of us scouts, Mr. and Mrs. Hilton and Bob and Art, the two Melvilles, and Kirk—that makes fifteen. Why,” she continued, as if the idea had just struck her, “that means eight girls and only five boys! That’s hard on the dancing!”
“I’ll tell you how we can fix that!” exclaimed Alice, who had finished making her ice cream, “I’ll wear my breeches and be a man. Who wants me for a partner?”
“I’d be charmed,” said Florence, laughingly.