"So it would," said Ethel. "Well, here we are at home now. Aunt Phœbe will soon begin to fry the supper. I do feel starving!"
Ethel let herself and her companions into the house with a latchkey. They passed the great shop where the vegetables were sold, and the huge appleroom where the fruits were kept from Saturday night to Monday morning. Up the narrow stairs they went, until at last they found themselves in a broad, low, cheerful sort of room—a nondescript room, with a thick red felt carpet on the floor, and heavy red curtains to the windows, and a laughing, cheerful, blazing fire in the grate. Florence gave a sigh of relief.
"It is peaceful here," she said. "I wish we had a room of this sort at home."
After the girls had eaten their supper, they put their heads together and had a long and earnest consultation as to what they were to do with regard to the girls at Penwerne Manor. There was little doubt that they were all intensely disappointed. The Manor had seemed to them, ever since they could remember anything, as a sort of earthly paradise; the girls who walked in twos up and down the sheltered, cloister-like enclosures, the girls who came to church at Tregellick Sunday after Sunday, the girls who occasionally rode over the neighboring moors, the girls who went to the seashore in the summer and enjoyed themselves bathing or in little boats in the harbor, were all girls of a superior degree to those commonplace children in the town of Tregellick. They adored them; they envied them. The chance of getting into their midst was a golden and dazzling prospect, and they were intensely loath to give it up. It was Emma at last who seemed to come to a satisfactory decision.
"I tell you what," she said; "Susan has bound herself to receive us. We have put money into this thing; we have arranged to bring a good deal of the feast ourselves. Susan owes me seven and six——"
"And me five shillings," said Florence.
"And she has borrowed my best sash," said Ethel. "She said she would be very careful of it, and let me have it back at the first opportunity."
"I wonder you lent it to her," said Emma.
"She had such a coaxing way, and she said she wanted it so badly. In short, she made it a sort of condition with regard to giving us this pleasure."
"Oh, never mind that sort of thing now," said Florence impatiently. "I'll have to go back home very shortly or Rufus will be coming thundering round, making no end of a fuss. What shall we do, girls? That is the question. This is Sunday night; Wednesday is no way off at all. Are we to go and enjoy ourselves, or are we to meekly sit down and give up our bit of fun?"