“Yes, and this fire,” Dicky chimed in.
“It makes me think of school,” Harold declared.
Everybody groaned.
“Perhaps it’s the popcorn,” Rosie said, “and the apples. But somehow I feel to-night just as though it were Halloween night. Oh, do you remember the beautiful party we had at Laura’s last Halloween?”
“Do I?” Maida answered. “I should say I did. It was the first Halloween party I ever went to. I shall remember it as long as I live. I remember sitting in the window of the Little Shop and watching all the pumpkin lanterns come bobbing along Primrose Court. Oh how lovely it was!”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Rosie reiterated dreamily, although she was vigorously shaking the popper, “that next Sunday night means Charlestown again, and Monday morning, horrid school once more. How shall we ever get used to being kept indoors? I shall stifle. I shall miss everything—oh dreadfully. But the thing I shall miss most is my lovely little room, out-of-doors. Oh no, it isn’t that,” she contradicted herself, “the thing I shall miss most is the cave. Everything that happens to us is like a story book; but the cave is most like a story book of all. Oh how sorry I was when we came to the end of it! I did so hope it would be a Mammoth Cave with a great big river in it and fish without eyes and chambers with stalactites and stalagmites.”
“If it had been,” Tyma Burle said shrewdly, “people would have been coming all the time to look at it and it wouldn’t be our cave any longer. I have enjoyed tennis most of anything,” Tyma went on. “I think it is the greatest game in the world.”
“I don’t wonder you like tennis,” Laura exclaimed, “when you can beat everybody at it. Oh, how mad it still makes me to think that when I’ve been playing tennis for two years that Tyma has to give himself a handicap when he plays with me.”
Everybody laughed. They were always amused by the spectacle on the tennis court of Laura’s rages when Tyma beat her so easily.