"Ah, don't!" cried Happie sharply. "Where is Penny? I just missed her."
"'Way in the front with Dorée," said Polly. "She's watching somebody moving in. There is a van at the door. I guess she couldn't have smelled the fudge."
"I think so, too, Polly," laughed Happie. "My goodness, that clock's stopped! It must be time we were getting dinner! Go see what time it is, Polly, please."
"Quarter to six!" Polly called back from the middle of the flat. "They're taking in a basket that looks as if it had a cat in it; I wonder if it's yellow, too?"
The "too" of Polly's remark referred to the Scollards' own beloved kitten, as yellow as a golden nugget, and named Jeunesse Dorée, obviously from his color.
Margery and Happie did not stop to bestow a passing thought upon the new inmates of the house, their fellow flat-dwellers, nor their cat, but sprang to get out the agate saucepans for their cooking, and to hurry away the implements of fudge-making, for it was fifteen minutes past their time for beginning to get dinner, and they prided themselves on not keeping their mother waiting when she came home at night from her hard day's work.
Happie enveloped herself in an ample apron and fell to peeling potatoes as if her life depended on getting them out of their jackets in a twinkling. Margery quietly, but speedily, put the meat in its pan and floured it delicately, then knelt before the oven, lighted its burners and slid the pan into place, devoutly hoping that the tenants on the lower floors would not require so much gas for their dinners that night as to lower the pressure and retard further the Scollards' tardy roasting.
Just behind her was the door of the dumb waiter, with the mouth-piece of its whistle beside it. From this whistle there suddenly issued a blood-curdling shriek, and Margery tumbled over backward, while Happie jumped to her feet, upsetting potatoes, peelings, pan of water and all on the spotless floor.
"Oh, that fearful whistle!" Happie cried, crimson with anger and the reaction from her fright. "If I lived here nine hundred and ninety-nine years, I never should get used to it!"
"Nor I," murmured Margery feebly, scraping up Happie's scattered peelings with the knife she had dropped, not rising, but turning her discomfiture to profit as she sat. "It's so sharp and so sudden!"