The poor woman sat down and dropped her tired face in her hands looking as if she were going to weep.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Bryant. There’s always something one can do. Let me think. Have you any junket tablets?”
“Why, yes,” said the despairing housekeeper, “But what is junket? An invalid’s food!”
“Wait till you see mine. It’s caramel junket, and we’ll serve it with whipped cream. You haven’t some preserved cherries or a few strawberries or something to put on the top of each dish, have you? It’s the prettiest thing you ever saw. Where is the sugar, quick? We must hurry. Have you some individual dishes that will be pretty to hold it?”
Mrs. Bryant produced some long stemmed sherbet glasses and a bottle of preserved cherries, saying dubiously:
“It’ll never cool. It’s way after four now.” But she watched the deft fingers as they manipulated the sugar over the flame, until it had reached the right perfection of caramel color and was stirred fizzing into the lukewarm milk.
“It won’t set,” said Mrs. Bryant, “mine never does except in real cold weather.”
“Oh, yes it will. I put in an extra tablet to hurry it,” said Joyce. “Now, I want some cream. Can I take it off those two bottles? It looks rich enough to whip.”
“Yes, it whips I guess,” sighed the woman, “but I never can get time for such frills. That’s why we’ve decided to sell the cow, it took so much time to tend to the milk. It’s really sold, but the man isn’t coming for it till next week.”
Joyce worked breathlessly, one eye on the clock, and all the while her heart watching for a little house to come riding down the street, yet the time went by and no house appeared. Could it be that the men had gone back on their word, or that they had made a mistake and taken it to the wrong street, or that something had happened to the precious little structure on the way?