“About noon, I suppose,” said the Little Captain. All morning she had been wondering if Allen would be with the boys, and now as the time drew near for their arrival she was nervous and jumpy, not at all like her usual calm young self.
The girls noticed the change, and once Mollie said, teasingly:
“Cheer up, honey. You know Will promised to bring Allen along, if he had to do it at the end of a rope. And you know, too, that Will is a man of his word!”
“I wonder,” Amy had added, casually, “if Allen has fixed up the matter of that old man’s will yet. He has been so very mysterious about it——”
“That he’s made us all curious,” finished Grace.
“I don’t see why,” said Mollie, pushing some burning scraps back into the heap of blazing paper, “he doesn’t tell us what he knows and let us share in the fun.”
“He will, when he gets ready,” said Betty, adding with a little caper she could not repress: “Oh, girls, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Aren’t you getting a bit excited?”
“Getting!” drawled Grace. “We have been, all along. Look at Amy,” she added with a chuckle, “hanging up a piece of rag and throwing her jacket on the floor!”
“She has it bad, poor child,” laughed Mollie, as, caught in the act, Amy laughed sheepishly.
“If you were attending to your own affairs, you wouldn’t have time to see so much,” she retorted, proceeding to restore her jacket to its proper place.