Polly and Penny clung around their mother's waist as she entered, Bob and Margery encircled her from each side with their loving arms, while Happie hugged her breathless, and Laura vainly strove for an opening for her own welcome.
"Such a dear little home! Such joy to get home to you, my blessings!" said the mother, as she said each night. "Have you been good and happy all this day?"
She went into the front room which was that nondescript allowed by flat life, neither drawing-room, library nor living-room, but a little of each. It was a pretty room, made so by its furnishing of books and pictures, and the mother looked about her, feeling anew that it was well worth the effort that taxed her slender strength to the utmost to maintain this nest and her nestlings within it.
"We've found a name for the flat at last, motherkins!" cried Happie, as she removed her mother's hat pins, while Laura and Margery unbuttoned her coat, and the two least girls pulled off a glove from each hand.
"Happie has," corrected Margery. "It's a nice, cozy, funny little name, just like this family."
"Tell me," smiled Mrs. Scollard.
"Patty-Pans!" announced Happie triumphantly. "I thought of it when I was pouring my cake into the cup pans. Don't you know that these flats are precisely like a patty-pan, every room following after and joining on to the next one the way the cups do in those sheets?"
"I see the resemblance." Mrs. Scollard laughed, and the weariness went out of her face for the moment as her eyes danced. "Shall we have a die cut for our letter paper: 'Patty-Pans,' and printed in bright silver like new tins? Only I'm afraid our correspondents might think that all our letters should be dated April first!"
"And the flat across is rented; the family came in to-day," Bob said, adding his information to the small fund of entertainment which it was the children's custom to amass daily for their mother's return.
"Oh, me! I hope they are not people who will play the piano all the evening when we are at our lessons!" Mrs. Scollard sighed, remembering past troubles.