"The name for our flat," said Happie. The Scollards had been trying ever since they had taken possession of it to find a name for their habitation, "because," Happie explained, "all residences of any account had names, and she wanted her estate to be no exception."
"What is it?" asked Margery, and Laura paused in the doorway with the bread plate in her hand to hear the answer.
"Patty-pans!" cried Happie triumphantly. "Don't you see that it is exactly what the flat is like?" She held up her baking tins to illustrate. "See," she went on, "how the rooms come along, one after the other, just precisely like these patty-pan cups? This is The Patty-Pans, or Patty-Pans-on-the-Hudson—only a few blocks off, at any rate, and that doesn't matter!"
"It's the very thing!" cried Bob appreciatively, and Margery laughed and agreed.
"It's not at all pretty," said Laura, whose sense of humor was defective. But she got no further with her objection. The little electric bell on the wall rang thrice, and all the Scollards in the rear rushed through the narrow hall, and were met at the door by Polly from the front, and Penny with Dorée in her arms.
This triple ring meant that the children's real day, the only part of the day in which the sun fully shone for them, although it began after sunset, had dawned, for it announced their mother's home-coming at night.
[CHAPTER II]
FIRE, AND OTHER ESCAPES
One's mother never has the appearance of any particular age. She does not look precisely young, because hers is the face to which our baby eyes are raised for comfort and guidance, it is from her that we receive and hope for all things. So it is impossible to realize that she is quite young. On the other hand the familiar, beloved face never wears the look of age, no matter how wrinkled it be, nor how far we have traveled from childhood. It is too dear, too perfectly the spring that quenches our thirst for unfailing love ever to look to us withered and age-stricken as it must to strangers. The young Scollards had never stopped to consider whether their mother was quite elderly, or very youthful—her age was swallowed up in the fact of her motherhood. In reality Charlotte Scollard was but just approaching the milestone of the fourth decade. She was a pale, slenderly built woman, with a worn, sweet face, like Margery's, but older and saddened. It wore a look of ill-health which her children saw too frequently to recognize fully, though the three eldest half perceived it at times, with a tightening of fear around their hearts.