She laughed at him, happily. “That’s all the fun of Christmas morning, I guess—not knowing what you’re going to get till the time comes. Little Lottie is going to get a Christmas present that she’s been longing for—Miss ’Rill. Won’t they all be happy in the Drugg house?”
“Huh!” snorted Marty. “I dunno as I’d call gettin’ a step-mother much of a Christmas present.”
“Well, I guess,” said Janice, indignantly, “if you were a little girl like Lottie and couldn’t remember any mother at all, that you’d be just as glad as she is to get one like Miss ’Rill.”
“All right—all right,” grumbled her cousin. “You needn’t get red-headed about it.”
As rapidly as the snow was gathering they did not realize that this was more than an ordinary storm. Uncle Jason was away on a job and Marty soon went whistling down the hill with his jacket collar turned up to keep the snow from sifting into his neck. He was bound for the Reading Room for a book with which to while away the long evening.
Sunset was not yet, however, although the chickens were going to roost. Janice ran in to Aunt ’Mira, glowing in both heart and healthy body. She did not mean to say anything to anybody about the wild ride to save Elder Concannon’s money; but it was something to remember with satisfaction.
Aunt ’Mira was deep, it seemed, in the rites and mysteries of some form of heathen worship. That is what it looked like at the girl’s first amazed glance into the sitting-room. The fleshy lady had a sheet draped around her and she was bowing and posturing and turning her head first over one shoulder and then the other—trying, it would seem, to look down her own spinal column.
“Dear me, Auntie! what is the matter now?” gasped Janice. “Aren’t you afraid you will hurt yourself doing that?”
“I know I’m hurting myself,” responded Aunt ’Mira, grimly, “but it’s the way to keep supple, they say. And I declare for’t! I don’t know nobody that needs sech trainin’ more’n I do.”
Janice had descried the propped-open physical culture magazine now, and understood—in part, at least.