“Open the door, just a little way, girls,” Polly would always say, just at the crucial moment, and the tempting fumes of some chafing-dish decoction would float away down the long dormitory corridor, until the noses of the twenty-eight caught it, and there was an instantaneous bombardment.
“Hold it open till the last minute when you see them coming,” Polly would cry, her brown eyes dancing with fun, as she presided in one of Annie May’s huge aprons, and waved a big spoon. “Just let them get a good whiff of it, so the clans will gather, and then we’ll bar the door.”
And the clans always gathered. First from one room, then another, in the upper dormitories, the “regulars” would troop forth, and cluster around the door where the day pupils ate their luncheon. Polly always held that it was wise to wait until twelve-thirty, as by that time the regulars would have finished eating. Sometimes they would catch murmurs from the corridor.
“Smells like crab meat,” some one would whisper, and from the inner shrine Polly would declaim,
“’Tis crab meat, with green peppers.”
Then a deep groan would rise from the “regulars,” and the Hungry Six would smile at each other, for revenge is sweet. They could not forget the midnight feasts which the “regulars” held while they were away.
Yet, at the very last minute, they had forgotten the chafing-dish. Some of the people were already leaving, and the imposing line of carriages outside the stately old Hall was growing thinner.
“Hadn’t one of us better go downstairs to the kitchen, and find Annie May,” suggested Ted, anxiously. “Polly’s probably talking to somebody, and has forgotten all about us. I saw the Admiral lift up his finger at her, and that signal between them always calls Polly to attention. Wasn’t it dear of him to come and talk to us! What was it he said? Oh, I know. Look, girls, like this.” Ted struck a dignified posture in the center of the floor, her chin set deeply in her lace collar, her brows drawn down in imitation of the Admiral’s own bushy ones.
“Standing with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,