"Oh, I know. Molly is always trying to get a samovar. But your folks, not being Russian, do not use that sort of teapot."
"No, ours is much simpler, but of course I think it is prettier. Well, you know how much I thank you, Mrs. Cosgrove. This house has been like—like a boarding-school to me!" Rose exclaimed, her voice heavy with sincerity.
"That's a fine idea!" and Mrs. Cosgrove laughed heartily. "I never thought of this being a girls' seminary, but if I wasn't so busy with my cafeteria I might take up the question," she concluded. It was not yet time to inform Rose she was to be made cashier of the girls' lunchroom, so that good news was for the moment withheld.
But somehow joy permeated the whole atmosphere, and even at the tests
Rose's cheeks fairly burned with suppressed excitement.
CHAPTER XXII
THE WHIRLING MAY-POLE
"Oh, isn't it too mean!" deplored Grace, talking to her chums, Cleo and Madaline, after succeeding in diverting the troublesome brother Benny over to his ballfield. "Hal Crane drove out on his wheel to the woods, as he promised, you know, and not a letter, nor a line, nor a scrap was there," and she dropped her dimpled chin down on her soft white dimity collar, until the top of her curly head slanted like a toboggan hill.
"That isn't what worries me most," interposed Madaline. "It is the fact—the solemn fact," and she rolled her round eyes as if expecting a mote to sail out on a tear—"that not one of our troop has done anything big enough to win the B. C."
"How do you know?" queried Cleo mysteriously. "We don't each of us know what every single member of the troop has done, do we?" "Oh, but we would be sure to hear of anything big enough to win the Bronze Cross," Grace assisted Madaline's argument. "And the True Treds are all so brave and such a fine set of girls! Land knows, I tried hard enough with tieing my man to the tree!" and she indulged in one of her unpredicted gales, "and now to think even he has deserted us!"
"He may—have had to go off for supplies or something," suggested Cleo. "We can hardly expect a cave man to be always so punctual. But isn't it lovely about our new member?"