Aunt Dora looked from one unruffled face to the other; then she got up quietly and stole from the room. She tiptoed through the hall to the pantry door. There she waited until she was sure the twins were busy at the dresser and stove.
So she stepped into the pantry and pushed aside the white dimity curtain at the window in the door which opened into the kitchen. One twin was busily buttering the tins while the other was sifting the ingredients of the biscuits in the big yellow mixing bowl.
"So Dorothy usually sifts the flour, does she?" muttered the determined old lady, staring hard at the back of the sifter's head.
But one thing Aunt Dora did not know. Every time the girl sifting the flour glanced up from her work she looked straight into a mirror over the dresser, tipped at such an angle that it showed the pantry door. She saw the curtain drawn back and her aunt's nose appear at the window. At once she said to her sister:
"Are you afraid of the wolf at the door?"
"Eh?" jerked out the other twin, looking up quickly.
"But if poor papa is so poor, you know, maybe one of us ought to go home with Aunt Dora."
The girl buttering the tins saw her sister's wink and nod, and glanced slily in the mirror, too.
"We will fight the wolf at the door and drive it away," she declared, with spirit. "We'll leave school and go to work rather than be separated. Isn't that the way you feel?"
"I should feel that I'd rather work than go home with Auntie, if I were Dora," declared she who was sifting.