"Goodness, the child's mad," declared Mollie, looking at her chum with a mixture of amusement and sympathy in her eyes. "What do you want to do, Amy, start a fight, or set the town on fire? Whatever it is, I'm for you, as Roy would say."
"Oh, I guess I must be crazy," said Amy, subsiding and seeming a little ashamed of her outburst. "Only, after so much band music and parades and bugle calls—everything in Deepdale seems so quiet."
"Well, if all you want is noise, we'll easily fix that," said Mollie briskly, running to the piano and gathering in Grace and Amy on the way. "Sing," she commanded, "and I'll make as much noise as I can on the piano."
Half laughing, half protesting, the girls obeyed while Mollie conscientiously made good her threat with the piano, and it was into this uproar that Betty Nelson stepped a moment later.
"Have mercy!" she screamed above the noise, both hands clapped over her ears while she laughed at them. "I thought they had turned the house into a lunatic asylum or something."
The music, if such it can be called, stopped so suddenly that Betty's last words rang out with absurd distinctness.
"Or something," Mollie mimicked, whirling around and catching the newcomer in a bear's embrace. "Come over to the couch, Betty Nelson, and explain yourself. Where have you been and why did you keep us waiting?"
Laughingly the Little Captain, as she was often called by the girls because of her talent for leadership, permitted herself to be dragged over to the couch by the impulsive Mollie, while Amy and Grace seated themselves on the arms.
"What would you?" protested Betty, looking from one accusing face to another. "I said I would meet you here at two-thirty, and it is only quarter past now."
"Only quarter past!" exclaimed Amy.