“Don’t whistle before you are out of the woods, my dear,” cautioned Uncle Arthur. “The party isn’t over yet.”
In the dining-room the children were reveling in good things to eat. Dainty chicken sandwiches; salad that made one’s mouth water; jelly and cake and candied fruit; bonbons and ice cream, and chocolate served in tall, slender cups, with whipped cream on top, and wee silver spoons in the saucers—spoons that looked as if they were intended for the daintiest of dolls.
“Gorry!” whispered Katie Schorr to Angeline Montague, “isn’t this fine?”
Uncle Arthur, standing in the doorway behind a heavy hanging, took a note-book out of his pocket and jotted something down in it.
At first there was not much chatter. The children were too busy for that, but by and by their tongues were loosened and then, how they did talk!
Rosy Hartigan became so brave that she actually consented to spell her name as the teacher in her school had taught her to do: “R-o, Ro, s-y, sy, Rosy; H-a-r, Har; syHar; RosyHar; T-i, ti; Harti; syHarti; RosyHarti; G-a-n, Gan; tigan; Hartigan; syHartigan; Rosy Hartigan!” At which Miss Cissy clapped her hands and cried: “Good!” but Elsie Blair whispered “Smarty!” in Rosy’s left ear.
Sarah Findlay, fired by Rosy’s success, said her brothers “Knew lots and lots of tricks. They had taught her to make the awfullest cross-eyed face in the world and she’d do it for them if they wanted her to. You just had to pull your mouth down at the corners with your two fingers, like this and then look cross eyed, like this and then——”
Uncle Arthur took out his note-book again and wrote down something in it, though no one saw him do it.
Suddenly Rosy Hartigan gave a piercing shriek and Miss Cissy hurried to her in distress, asking what the trouble was. It seemed that Rosy’s left arm had been most terribly pinched, so that it “hurt like everything,” but when Elsie Blair, who sat on that side of Rosy, was asked if she had pinched her arm, she protested “No, she hadn’t, and if Rosy went and said she had, Rosy was nothing but an old story——”
But Miss Cicely’s gentle hand over her lips smothered the rest of the word and, Rosy being comforted, supper went merrily on. At last, when nobody could possibly eat another mouthful, Miss Cissy said they would all go back into the drawing-room and have more games. So back they went and played “Hunt the slipper” and “A tisket, a tasket” and then a big bag was brought in and they all “grabbed” for presents. After that it was time to go home, but Uncle Arthur insisted on one more game and chose “Forfeits,” which was “the loveliest fun” in the world, for when Miss Cicely held the forfeits over his head he invented the funniest things you ever heard of that the owner must do to redeem them.