Robert had once more arisen to go. He stood looking down at pretty Margery smiling up at him. "You do that in spite of yourself," he said.
"Auntie Keren, you really are a duck!" said Happie, putting her arm around the elder Keren-happuch's tall, thin figure and conducting her down the hall. "Let me take you safely to your room, Fairy Godmother. You are much too valuable a fairy godmother to go down this long passage alone."
"I am not going to my room, Happie," said Miss Keren as Happie paused at what had been Bob's door. "I want to talk with your mother in the dining-room a half hour. She is giving Laura mathematics, or trying to. Mathematics and the artistic temperament seem to have no affinity. It is wonderful that child can count time! You run back to Margery and Gretta, I don't want you."
"Frankness, Miss Keren-happuch, is admirable, but horrible. I suppose I can't be offended with a fairy godmother, though! Only think of going to bed with three, a whole three, good times to dream over! How deliriously happy we are going to be!" Happie recklessly squeezed Miss Keren as she pulled away her arm and faced right about on her summary dismissal. Her last vestige of awe of Miss Keren had vanished. She realized the squeeze herself only when she had almost reached her own door. "It's the fourteenth of February—why, so it is!" Happie thought, stopping short at the discovery. "We've been getting valentines. Winter must be breaking up, for there's not a trace of ice between Aunt Keren and me now."
CHAPTER XIV
LITTLE SERENA
"I wonder what it all means," said Happie, as she turned from the glass to let Margery button the middle buttons of her waist. "We are giving a party to-day in the tea room; next week we intend to close it for three days. It seems to me it isn't as much like a real business as it should be, not a businesslike business. I meant to go into it in a life-or-death way. Just as if I were all the time reciting, 'Give me three grains of corn, mother,' and the tea room were the three grains of corn; all there was between us and starvation, I mean. But it is rather like a playhouse tea room. I wonder why?"
"It's Miss Bradbury's fault," said Gretta before Margery could answer. "First she paid the rent ahead, now she invites us up——"
"To your house!" Margery laughingly interrupted.