"Why, Mrs. Wenner, how do you do? And this is your sister-in-law. We are glad to see you both."
"Thank you," answered Laura. "Sarah, this is Dr. Ellis. I think you said Sarah was to have my old room."
"Yes," answered the principal. "Eugene will take you up and give you the keys. Here, Eugene."
In another minute they were in the elevator; then they went down a wide hall and turned a corner.
"Here we are. I wonder whether your room-mates are here."
It was the bell-boy who answered as he flung the door open.
"It looks so, miss."
The two newcomers stood in the doorway and gasped. Sarah was not entirely unacquainted with confusion. She knew what the kitchen at home looked like at the end of a morning's baking at which the twins and Albert had been allowed to assist. But the twins and Albert at their worst could accomplish nothing to equal this.
A room in which two trunks are being unpacked is not expected to look very neat, but this confusion seemed the result of careful effort. There were dresses scattered here and there, not on the backs of chairs, or laid across the beds, but dropped to the floor and in heaps on the table. There were shoes, not set side by side, but widely scattered, a slipper and an overshoe on the bureau, a boot and a slipper on the radiator. A drawer had been taken from the bureau and laid on a bed; into it a trunk-tray had been emptied, helter skelter, as though its contents were waste paper. Apparently the owner had been suddenly called away, for the tray still lay upside down across the drawer.
To Sarah's Pennsylvania-German eyes, the scene was terrible.