Adelaide knitted her brows. “We must get up some sort of an entertainment. It makes me tired to think of it, but there’s no other way.”
“And in the mean time, Emma Jane must find room for those children some way,” said Winnie. “I will call a meeting of the Hornets in our corner to-night, and we will pledge ourselves to raise money enough for one guest chamber for these children, and until it is arranged for, Emma Jane must make up beds for them on the school desks, or we can buy a retroussé bedstead for the parlor.”
“Retroussé bedstead! What’s that?” Milly asked, in a puzzled way.
“Don’t be dense, Milly; it’s vulgar to speak of a turn-up nose, you know; and I don’t know why we should insult a parlor organ bedstead in the same way. If we can’t afford that sort of thing, they might turn the dining tables upside down; they would make better cribs than the children have now, I’ll venture to say.”
“You will tuck them up, I suppose, with napkins and table-cloths,” Cynthia sneered. But Winnie paid no attention to the interruption.
“They will not mind a little crowding, and the thing will march right along if we only plunge into it. They must not stay another night in that old tenement. Polo said there was a rag-picker under them, and a woman who had delirium tremens in the next room. I am going down to-morrow afternoon to take them to the Home.”
A meeting of our own particular circle of King’s Daughters, which was made up of ourselves and the “Hornets,” took place that evening in the Hornets’ Nest. The Hornets were a coterie of mischievous girls rooming in a little family like the Amen Corner, but in the attic story under the very eaves. They took up the idea of the guest chamber with great enthusiasm, but they were nearly as impecunious as ourselves. Suddenly Little Breeze—our pet name for Tina Gale—exclaimed, “I have a notion! We will invite the school to a ‘Catacomb Party, and the underground Feast of the Ghouls.’”
“How very scareful that sounds!” said Trude Middleton. “What is it, anyway?”
“Oh! it’s a mystery, a blood-curdling mystery. It will cost everybody fifty cents, but it will be worth it. I want Witch Winnie to be on the committee of arrangements with me, and you must all give us full authority to do just as we please; and it is to be a surprise, and you must ask no questions.”
“We trust you. Where’s it to be? In the sewers, or the cathedral crypts?”