It was half an hour later when the two friends set out for Wayne Hall.
"I am so happy; it seems as though I must be with you girls to-night," declared Ruth. "I am so anxious to see Arline. My Daffydowndilly will be happy, too, for my sake. And Grace, I have a strange presentiment that I shall see him before long. I can't think of him as anything but alive. I'm so glad that you told me. It would have been a dreadful shock to have had the news come through Miss West or her friends."
"She hasn't the slightest idea that we know she was in the hall," said Grace. "I imagine you will hear of your father through half a dozen different sources in the morning. I don't believe she intended to tell you to-day. I think it was part of her plan to take you by surprise and completely unnerve you. Alberta Wicks and Mary Hampton are efficient town criers," Grace added bitterly. "She depended on them to spread the news in the cruelest way."
"Why, Grace, I never heard you speak so bitterly of any one before!" exclaimed Ruth.
"Ruth, to tell the honest truth, I am thoroughly disgusted with those two girls," confessed Grace wearily. "They have been at the bottom of every annoyance I have had since I came to Overton. It may not be charitable to say so, but I shall certainly not regret seeing them graduated and gone from Overton. I know it sounds selfish, but I can't help it. I mean it. And now we are going to talk only of delightful things. I think we ought to give a spread to-night in honor of you. It isn't every day one finds a long-lost father. Arline is going to stay to dinner, and, of course, she'll stay afterward."
Grace's proposal of a spread met with gleeful approval, and in spite of a hearty six-o'clock dinner, there was no lack of appetite when at ten o'clock Elfreda, who insisted on taking the labor of the spread upon her own shoulders, appeared in the door announcing that it was ready. By borrowing Grace's table and using it in conjunction with her own, employing the bureau scarf for a centerpiece, and filling up the bare spaces with paper napkins, the table assumed the dignity of a banqueting board. There were even glasses and plates and spoons enough to go round and one could have either grape juice or tea, Elfreda informed them. "You'd better take tea first, though, because there are only two bottles of grape juice, and we need that for the toast to Ruth's father. Of course if you insist upon having grape juice——"
"Tea," was the judiciously lowered chorus from the obliging guests.
"Thank you," bowed Elfreda. "I wouldn't have given you the grape juice, at any rate."
By half-past ten nothing remained of the feast but the grape juice, and the guests began clamoring insistently for that.
"We are breaking the ten-thirty rule into microscopic pieces," declared Elfreda as she dropped slices of orange and pineapple on the ice in the bottom of the glasses, added orange juice, sugar and grape juice. "If it isn't sweet enough, help yourself to sugar. The bowl is on the table. And you can only have one straw apiece. The commissary department is short on straws. A word of warning, don't drink the toast to Ruth's father through a straw," she ended with a giggle.