“I believe you look worse with the dirt off than you did with it on,” laughed Peggy. “What are we going to do with her, Florence?”
Florence shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know. If Daddy sees her like this we’ll have to explain what’s happened, and I don’t want to do that.”
“And I don’t want you to, either,” Jo Ann put in quickly. “I want to surprise him by solving the mystery of that window. He doesn’t seem to think there’s anything strange about it—he didn’t even look at it.”
“You must promise to be very careful, whatever you do,” Florence warned.
“Didn’t I just tell you, Jo, that sometimes you’re quite a problem?” added Peggy teasingly.
“You just wait till I’ve had my bath,” Jo Ann replied as she started out of the room. “When I finish dressing, I’ll look all right.”
When she returned a little later and preened herself triumphantly before them, Peggy burst into a peal of laughter.
“She looks exactly as if she’d stuck her head in the flour barrel and the flour had stuck in spots, doesn’t she?” she remarked to Florence.
“Well, her skin does look queer—a little like parchment or canvas,” reluctantly admitted the more polite Florence.
Jo Ann grimaced. “I like that—after all my efforts.”