Glancing up from this innocent triumph, she encountered the eyes of the Master of the House fixed speculatively on the big turkey.
"I'm afraid everything is very cold," she confided with distinctly formal regret.
"Not for anything," laughed Delcote quite suddenly, "would I have kept you waiting—if I had only known."
Two spots of color glowed hotly in the girl's cheeks.
"It was not for you I was waiting," she said coldly.
"N—o?" teased Delcote. "You astonish me. For whom, then? Some incredible wight who, worse than late—isn't going to show up at all?... Heaven sent, I consider myself.... How else could so little a girl have managed so big a turkey?"
"There ... isn't any ... carving knife," whispered Flame.
The tears were glistening on her cheeks now instead of just in her eyes. A less observing man than Delcote might have thought the tears were really for the carving knife.
"What? No carving knife?" he roared imperiously. "And the house guaranteed 'furnished'?" Very furiously he began to hunt all around the kitchen in the most impossible places.
"Oh, it's furnished all right," quivered Flame. "It's just chock-full of dead things! Pressed flowers! And old plush bags! And pressed flowers! And—and pressed flowers!"