It was a good dinner, served on the coarsest of china, but well cooked. And after they had eaten it and washed the dishes, they were ready to go to bed and to sleep, not quite so forlorn in their new home.
III
They were awakened the next morning by a persistent and none too gentle knocking at the back door, and Nina, slipping on a dressing gown, hurried to respond. She opened the door upon a riotous, glittering June morning, and Margie, clear-eyed and glowing as the dawn—but far from amiable.
“Here’s your breakfast!” she said, thrusting a wooden box into Nina’s hands.
“Oh, but how awfully good and kind!” cried Nina. “I never—”
“Bill said you didn’t have a thing in the house,” Margie remarked, scornfully, “and couldn’t even light the stove. So he told me to bring this.”
Her brusque contempt was a little too much even for the gentle Nina.
“It’s very kind of you,” she said, with a polite smile. “But we’d have managed somehow—”
Margie shrugged her shoulders.[Pg 389]
“Well, Bill told me to bring your breakfast,” she said. “And to ask what you wanted from the store.”