Supper that night was a party. The Smiling Lady had sent John over with a big bunch of glorious blue larkspur. “Peg’s ‘glad’ flower is the flower for you all, to-night,” said the word that came with it.
And Mrs. Benderby had made a cake with pink icing and an amazing design in little red candies around the edge of it, and there was ice cream, a contribution from Mrs. Neal.
“It’s like a birthday—only I never had this kind of a birthday,” said Pegeen, as she beamed across the blue flowers that, for all their gladness, were not so glad as her face, while Mrs. Benderby, torn between her ideal of the solemnity appropriate in waiting on a city gentleman and her sympathetic joy, hovered round the table with relays of hot biscuit and fried chicken, and Wiggles, having been surreptitiously presented with a chicken leg, by Peg—a thing entirely against her own rules—sat on his haunches and begged for more.
Boots was asleep in the hammock and Spunky, true to feline type, assumed a profound indifference and sat on the hearth with her front paws folded cozily under her and a bored look on her little gray face.
“You are going to have this kind of birthdays from now on—only more so,” Archibald announced. “This is just an unbirthday party. Wait till you see your birthday party. When is your birthday, Peg?”
“September—the fifteenth. I’m glad I wasn’t born in winter. Spring would have been nicest. I’d have liked being born along with everything else.”
Archibald dissented.
“Wouldn’t have done at all,” he said firmly. “You were special—extra special. Autumn needed you to keep it from being sad.”
Mrs. Benderby wouldn’t allow Pegeen to help with the dishes.
“Other nights, maybe, if you want to, but not to-night,” she insisted. So, as the afterglow faded and the stars came out to look at a blithe new moon Archibald and Peg sat once more on their familiar doorstep. For a time they were both silent, listening to the night noises, watching the play of moonlight and starlight across the meadow and the clutching shadows on the wood’s edge.