Elaine waited for the explosion that did not come. "Very well," Peggy said resignedly. As the door closed and Dick's footsteps echoed along the hall, she flung a twinkle in Elaine's direction. "It never rains but it pours," she quoted.
"Why, I don't see--" Elaine checked herself, reflecting that it was not necessary for the matter to be explained to her satisfaction. But Peggy took it on herself to reply to the unspoken remonstrance.
"I suppose I might have told Dick he couldn't have Looney to-night. But it's only one more and it doesn't really make much difference. Besides we like to have Dick feel that his friends are welcome. When you are bringing up a boy," concluded Peggy, laughing, and still very much in earnest, "you have to think of so many things."
Peggy did not eat her supper that evening till the others had finished. She waited on the table, and baked biscuit, and if there was anything more remarkable than the celerity with which the biscuit plates were cleared, it was the promptness with which they were refilled, each time with flaky, smoking-hot biscuits, which fairly melted in one's mouth. Only in one respect had Peggy miscalculated, and that was when she remarked that the maple syrup would take off the edge of her guests' appetites. To all appearances it only whetted them to a more razor-like keenness.
But everybody was satisfied at last, and Peggy ate her own supper, her cheerfulness unimpaired by the fact that the baking dish had been scraped clean before her turn came, and that her baked potato was overdone. She protested against Elaine's determination to stay and help her with the dishes, but Elaine was firm.
"It's only fair, as part payment for my lesson. And, besides, I dare say I need to learn things about washing dishes as well as cooking."
As a matter of fact, Elaine had learned several things that afternoon, and the secret of making baking-powder biscuits was not perhaps the most important. She had seen a girl not far from her own age equal to an emergency which older housekeepers would have found trying, keeping her head clear and temper unruffled. Elaine was beginning to understand that it was not what Peggy did, so much as her way of doing it, that set her apart.
"I feel real selfish keeping you so long," Peggy declared, when the last dish was in its place. "Your poor mother will have been awfully lonely."
"O, no, she--" Elaine paused with an air of checking herself on the verge of an admission. "Mamma doesn't mind being alone," she ended, but Peggy was quite sure that this was not what she had intended to say.
Peggy stood in the doorway while her new friend and pupil crossed the yard, passed through the opening in the hedge and tried her own door. It was locked, and Elaine knocked and waited till her mother came to let her in. As the door opened Elaine turned and waved a good night to the figure framed in light, watching to be sure that she was safely home.