“There’s a most remarkable thing about this House Party of ours! Every person invited has come and not one tried to get out of so doing! Three cheers for the Giver of the Party! and three times three for—all of us!” cried happy Seth Winters, from his seat of honor at the end of the great table in the dining-room, on the Saturday evening following.
Lamps and candles shone, silver glittered, flower-bedecked and spotlessly clean, the wide apartment was a fit setting for the crowd of joyous young folk which had gathered in it for supper; and the cheers rang out as heartily as the master of the feast desired.
Then said Alfaretta, triumphantly:
“The Party has begun and I’m to it, I’m in it!”
“So am I, so am I! Though I did have to invite myself!” returned Mr. Winters. “Strange that this little girl of mine should have left me out, that morning when she was inviting everybody, wholesale.”
For to remind her that he “hadn’t been invited” was the “trouble” which he had stooped to whisper in Dorothy’s ear, as she left him at the smithy door. So she had run home and with the aid of her friends already there had concocted a big-worded document, in which they begged his presence at Deerhurst for “A Week of Days,” as they named the coming festivities; and also that he would be “Entertainer in Chief.”
“You see,” confided Dolly, “now that the thing is settled and I’ve asked so many I begin to get a little scared. I’ve never been hostess before—not this way;—and sixteen people—I’m afraid I don’t know enough to keep sixteen girls and boys real happy for a whole week. But dear Mr. Winters knows. Why, I believe that darling man could keep a world full happy, if he’d a mind.”
“Are you sorry you started the affair, Dolly Doodles? ’Cause if you are, you might write notes all round and have it given up. You’d better do that than be unhappy. Society folks would, I reckon,” said Molly, in an effort to comfort her friend’s anxiety. “I’m as bad as you are. It begins to seem as if we’d get dreadful tired before the week is out.”
“I’d be ashamed of myself if I did that, Molly, I’ll go through with it even if none of you will help; though I must say I think it’s—it’s sort of mean for you boys, Jim and Monty, to beg off being ‘committees.’”
“The trouble with me, Dolly, is that my ideas have entirely given out. If you hadn’t lost that hundred dollars I could get up a lot of jolly things. But without a cent in either of our pockets—Hmm,” answered Monty, shrugging his shoulders.