“You be suah and stir dat up well from de bottom, chile,” cautioned Aunty. “Doan’t want all juice when you got orange, an’ banana, an’ strawberries, an’ cherries, an’ mint leaves.”
“Oh, you darling Aunty Welcome,” cried Ted and Sue, and Ruth blew the old mammy a kiss from her finger tips, while Isabel and Kate smiled. They were all favorites with her, and knew mighty well how to value her favor.
Polly set the tray at her end of the long table, and poured out the luscious summer drink while she went on talking.
“There’s one more to come still, girls. I hope you will all agree with me and be nice to her. It’s Crullers.”
“Crullers! Why, she has gone home,” exclaimed Isabel.
“No, she hasn’t,” said Polly, calmly. “Her brothers have the measles, and everybody else’s little brothers and sisters are likely to have it at Sharon Hill, where she lives, so Crullers cannot go home for a vacation. I found her crying when I left you girls last Thursday, and I told her to come to-day. Do you mind?”
“I don’t,” Ruth spoke up cheerfully. “I always liked Crullers, poor little thing.”
“Poor little thing,” Isabel repeated, dubiously. “She’s heavier than I am, and can eat nearly a whole pie at once.”
The other girls broke into a peal of laughter over the protest. Nobody dreamt of taking Isabel or her protests at all seriously. She was always the first to see the windmills waving their terrible arms in the distance, and the first one to plan the attack on them. Crullers was a favorite with all the day scholars at Calvert Hall. Her name was Jane Daphne Adams, but the combination had proven too great a strain on the Hungry Six’s sense of humor, so they had cut it short to Crullers. Four times a month a large box arrived for Jane Daphne, filled with crullers from home, and she never failed to donate them to the chafing dish feasts. Therefore she herself had been named in honor of them.
Before there was time to say any more, there was a step in the hall, and Crullers herself appeared, rather shyly, in the library doorway. She was plump and rosy-cheeked, with deep dimples and big blue eyes that seemed to question everything, and if there was anything at all in the way that Crullers could fall over, she always took a tumble. At school the girls had declared that Crullers would trip over her own shadow any time. She was fifteen, and slow in every way, slow to think, or act, or speak, or learn, and awkward as some overgrown lamb; but behind the awkward shyness there lay a staunch, faithful nature that Polly knew and loved. She had found out long ago that it was far safer to depend on Crullers’ slowness, than on Isabel’s hasty willingness that usually burnt itself out like a pinwheel in two minutes.