The full moon shone down with its broadest smile on the group of young people who occupied Mrs. Gray’s roomy, old-fashioned veranda. As on another June night that belonged to the past, Mrs. Gray’s Christmas children had gathered home.
“We’re here because we’re here,” caroled Hippy Wingate. “But allow me to make one observation.”
“One,” jeered Reddy Brooks. “You mean one hundred.”
“That’s very unkind in you, Reddy,” returned Hippy in a grieved tone. “Just to show you how entirely off the track you are I will make that one observation and subside.”
“I didn’t know you had such a word as ‘subside’ in your vocabulary,” derided David Nesbit.
“Nora, where art thou? Thy husband is calling,” wailed Hippy.
“I would hardly call that an observation,” laughed Grace.
“It sounds more like an anguished appeal for help,” remarked Anne.
“Or a perpetration by a deaf man who hasn’t the least idea of how it sounds,” added Tom Gray cruelly.
“Nora,” rebuked Hippy, fixing a disapproving eye on his wife, who was laughing immoderately, “how can you hear your husband thus derided and laugh at his suffering? Oh, if Miriam were only here to protect me. By the way,” he went on innocently, “where is Miriam?”