“I had better let Kitty and Mabel know that you are in,” he said.
He went into the little hall and shouted his sisters’ names. The next moment two trim, neatly-dressed little girls, with long hair hanging down their shoulders, in dark-blue frocks and white pinafores, came tripping in.
“Mother’s come,” said Llewellyn; “she wants tea. Sound the gong when it is ready.”
He bounded up the narrow stairs three at a time to his own special den at the top of the house. There, big, handsome, overgrown boy that he was, he shed some tears. He was ashamed of his tears; they scalded right down into his heart.
“I wish I didn’t feel it so much,” he said to himself. “I just had a wild hope for a moment, when mother spoke about good news, that it had something to do with me. But it’s only Leslie. Well, dear old girl, why shouldn’t it be about her? What a brute I am to grudge it to her. She is mother’s right hand, and about the very best girl in the world. There, I shall hate myself if I give way another moment. I’ll just tell mother right out, and put an end to the thing. She’ll be a bit surprised, but I guess she’ll be only too glad to consent. It’s good-by to daydreams, that’s all; but a fellow can’t think of them when his mother is in the question.”
Meanwhile the girls downstairs were quickly preparing the tea. Kitty went to the kitchen to fetch the tray with the cups and saucers; Mabel laid the white cloth, which was made of the finest damask, on the center table. Kitty then knelt down before the fire to make an apparently unlimited supply of buttered toast; Mabel put the right amount of tea into the old teapot. There were many
relics of bygone respectability, nay, of bygone wealth, in the Gilroys’ humble house. The silver teapot was one—it was real silver, not electroplate. It was very thin and of an antique shape, and the children were often heard to declare that nothing would induce them to have their tea made in anything else. The cups and saucers, too, were of rare old china and of a quaint pattern. They were neither cracked nor broken, because the girls themselves washed them and looked after them, and put them away in the little pantry.
The small maid of all work, Elfreda, was never allowed to go near the pantry. She only did the rough work under severe superintendence from Kitty; but the house was perfectly organized, and no one felt unduly fatigued.
The tea, when it was ready, consisted of fresh eggs, honey in the comb, hot cakes which Mabel had been secretly watching for the last half-hour, a pile of buttered toast, bread both brown and white, delicious country butter, tea, and even cream.
When everything was in order, Mabel sounded the gong, and Llewellyn came down.