Again Mr. Pinkney expressed his amusement. His wife, who was wholly without a sense of humor or fun, frowned at her husband’s openly expressed amusement. Moreover, she wished that Sammy was less boisterous. And she blamed Mr. Pinkney for encouraging Sammy’s ruder tastes.
“He is getting old enough now to appreciate better things,” she said in private to Mr. Pinkney. “See how nice it is of him to think of giving the little girls a nice present. I wonder what he will decide upon.”
“You leave it to Sammy,” chuckled her husband. “He’ll think of something that will surprise them—and probably surprise you, too.”
“I hope it will be nice.”
“Remember,” said the man in warning, “that it was Sammy who gave Tess and Dot that goat, Billy Bumps. It’s been a cross to the rest of the Corner House crowd, I have no doubt.”
“Oh, dear! Don’t suggest such a thing!” gasped Mrs. Pinkney.
Meanwhile the suggestion Dr. Forsyth had made to Mr. Howbridge regarding a winter trip South for the Corner House girls, bore fruit. The lawyer had business at St. Sergius, the capital of one of the island colonies in the Caribbean Sea. St. Sergius was a commercial port of some importance, and the business that called Mr. Howbridge there was of moment.
He had intended to remain at a hotel there for some weeks, and had even written for hotel booklets and the like. Now he proposed to make the trip a real outing, and he broached the matter to Ruth.
“Oh, Guardy!” she sighed, “that sounds fine,” and she began, Mrs. MacCall said, “to perk up immediately.” Heretofore she had shown little power of recovery from her illness—not as much as Agnes showed. Now she became almost as enthusiastic as her livelier sister over the proposed journey into warmer climes.
Of course she wrote at once to Luke about it and from him received the most amazing reply, worded about like this: