"I was, dear; I felt as if I could not wait for my dear girls' good things, but when I see them I cannot eat, although I appreciate the perfect seasoning, and how fortunate I am in my cooks." Mrs. Scollard laughed a little as she spoke, and her eyes rested lovingly on Margery and Happie, but she only broke a corner of one of the golden patty-pan cakes, and took bird-like tastes of the delicate blanc mange. It seemed to the older girls and Bob that the pallor of her face, the shadows under her eyes, the droop of her lips had never been so apparent.
Before they had time to dwell on the thought and what it might portend, there came a great clatter from the kitchen, and Dorée flew into the dining-room with his golden fur so electrified that he looked like a four-legged sunflower, with very little difference in his size and shape at any point.
"What under the canopy——" Bob began, jumping up from the table and running out, followed by his sisters.
Somebody was hammering madly on the dumb waiter door with a competent stick. Bob opened the door emphatically, and there, in the opposite doorway, stood the boy whom they had seen in the afternoon, his stick raised for further pounding, but with a broad smile on his face that did not suggest anything in the least malicious.
"Say, what's the matter with you?" demanded Bob.
"Would you be so very kind as to return our cat?" asked the boy with exaggerated mildness.
"We haven't got your cat; that's ours," said Bob, pointing over his shoulder to where Jeunesse Dorée was standing sniffing the situation with greatly elongated body, having returned to investigate what had frightened him, with true feline nervous courage and curiosity.
"'Tis true, my lord, and pity 'tis 'tis true,'" returned the boy. "For that's a beauty cat. Ours is merely a cat of many colors, but we are fond of him. He is on your fire escape, having leaped across from this one. From the sounds I have heard, I think he has upset a pan of something, though it's too dark for me to see."
"Oh, my fudge!" cried Happie, and threw up the window.
A tiger cat immediately jumped into the kitchen, to Dorée's intense disapproval, and Happie fished her pan of fudge from between the slats of the fire escape floor, where it had lodged, caught by the transverse slats on its way down to the ground. The candy bore the unmistakable imprint of the tiger cat's "paddy-paw" feet, and Happie surveyed it with chagrin, while Polly stroked the interloper, and Penny clasped struggling Dorée to her breast, to prevent his manifest intention to punish his neighbor.