“Don’t you like it?” said Tom again sweetly.
“Like it!” said Winona, beginning to giggle.
Four half-barrel hoops had been wreathed in smilax, and arched across the table at regular intervals, one at each end and one between each two places. In the middle of the table, completely hiding the olives, lay a half-opened gridiron, also wound with smilax. It was all very neatly done, for Tom was very neat-handed; but the general effect was rather startling.
“It—why, it looks like somebody’s grave!” said Winona protestingly.
Her tone was so stern that Puppums rose from beneath the table and tried nervously to hide under the sideboard, revealing as he went a decoration of smilax round his neck, continued in a garland down his spine, fastened at the tail. He did not seem to like it.
“That’s what it is!” said Tom complacently, as Winona pounced on the abject dog and unwreathed him. “Here’s the magazine I got it from. You said to. All there was in this month’s copy was a page of neat and inexpensive grave decorations. I copied the handsomest one in the bunch, ‘William R. Hicks; complete cost of decoration three dollars and twenty cents.’ That thing in the middle’s a Gates Ajar, or the nearest I could get to it. It got a prize, too.”
“Do you suppose I want William R. Hicks’s grave, or anybody’s grave, on the table when we’re having a special hand-made dinner that I’ve spent most of the afternoon on?” demanded his sister, laughing in spite of her objections.
“What’s the row?” asked Billy cheerfully, appearing in the door with an armful of roses and ferns.
“I followed Win’s directions about the table, and she doesn’t seem to like it,” said Tom in a voice that was intended to sound injured.
“What’s the gridiron for? A gentle reminder of the Cannibal Isles? We don’t really know yet that they’re missionaries!” said Billy.