“Our supper guests are arriving,” exclaimed Mrs. Hartwell-Jones smiling.
“Oh!” cried Letty, jumping to her feet. “May I tell them?”
“Of course you may, my dear, that is, the children. The grown-ups already know. I could not keep my secret from Mrs. Baker.”
Letty flew out of the room, and met the Baker family mounting the stairs. She looked so radiantly happy that Christopher felt sure that there was going to be something particularly good for supper.
When they had all gathered in the sitting-room, after the greetings were over, Letty announced her glorious news, and then, oh, what excitement prevailed! The old Parsons house had never known anything like it. Every one talked at once, no one knew what any one else was saying, and no one answered questions. Indeed, nobody expected to be answered at first, nor said anything of any importance. They just “oh’d” and “ah’d” and kissed one another and laughed—and cried a little bit too, the feminine part. At this point Christopher drew his grandfather aside and said in a disgusted voice:
“There they go again! What makes women and girls cry so much, grandfather? They’re as bad when they’re pleased as when they’re sorry.”
Letty’s cheeks grew redder and redder, and her eyes danced and sparkled until they were fit companions for the stars that were already beginning to peep through the darkening sky outside. For it was growing later and later. Christopher began to be afraid that nobody would remember about supper. He could not be the one to remind Mrs. Hartwell-Jones, since he was her guest, but the picnic in the woods seemed farther and farther in the past until at length he decided that it had happened the day before—or maybe years ago! A fellow’s stomach can’t stay empty forever, you know, and he began to wonder what were the first symptoms of starvation.
Mrs. Hartwell-Jones came to herself and a realization of her duties as hostess in time, however, to save him from the actual pangs of starvation, and Mrs. Parsons, who had come up with Anna “to see what it was all about” hustled down-stairs again with the promise that she would have supper on the table “in a jiffy.”
At table the grown-ups, who all sat together at one end of the table, seemed to have a good deal to say to each other that was serious, but the children were brimful of fun and nonsense, and Letty kept the twins in a gale of laughter, just as she had kept Anna Parsons and Mrs. Hartwell-Jones in the afternoon.
After supper the children went out-of-doors and sat on the steps in the sweet night air while Letty sang to them. They grew very quiet and sober in the soft, solemn darkness. Presently Christopher said briskly, by way of breaking what he thought was beginning to be an awkward silence: