But there on the platform stood Letty, smiling shyly and holding fast to her father’s hand, and, what seemed really wonderful to Susan, Letty wore a little squirrel cap and tippet and muff like her own.
“We are twins!” cried Susan in an ecstasy of joy, as arm in arm they walked up the street behind Grandfather and Mr. Spargo.
Her eyes were glancing hither and thither as she surveyed the neat red-brick houses, with white front door and glistening white doorstep, each in its own spacious garden plot, that made up street after street in Banbury Town.
“We are real twins,” agreed Letty, her blue eyes shining and her yellow curls dancing as she nodded eagerly at Susan. “And we are going to sleep together; Mother said so. And I asked Annie what was for dinner to-night, but all she would tell me was ‘Brussels sprouts’ and ‘Queen of Puddings.’ You like Queen of Puddings, don’t you?”
Susan admitted that she liked Queen of Puddings. She had never before heard of “Bussels sprouts,” but, if asked, she would willingly have said that she liked them too, so happy was she to be in Banbury and visiting Letty Spargo.
“But I haven’t told you the nicest yet, Susan,” went on Letty, squeezing her visitor’s arm as she talked. “There is going to be a Fair in our church two days after to-morrow, and there is going to be a Blackbird Pie. Mother is going to have it, Mother and Miss Lamb. Miss Lamb is my Sunday-School teacher. And they are making the curtains for it now, red curtains with big blackbirds flying all over them. Now aren’t you glad you came to see me?”
Susan’s head was whirling. What was a blackbird pie, and why should a pie have curtains?
At dinner, Susan discovered that “Bussels sprouts” were like baby cabbages, but it was not until later in the evening that Mrs. Spargo, seeing Susan’s bewilderment at Letty’s talk of the Blackbird Pie, made clear the mystery to her.
“It is not a real pie, Susan,” said she. “It is going to be the largest dishpan we can buy, covered with paper to look like a pie and filled with little articles and toys that cost five or ten cents each. You will pull a string, and out of the pie will come something nice. And the blackbird curtains are to drape the booth. Do you understand?”
Susan smiled up into Mrs. Spargo’s face. Already she felt at home with Letty’s mother. And she liked Letty’s baby, too, a fat, good-natured blue-eyed baby, not quite two years old, who poked his fingers into everything and who never cried no matter how many times he sat down hard on the floor with a thump.