"Well!" admitted Gretta. "Only it never can seem mine. Up to the Ark, anyway, and tells you to close the tea room. I think she makes us all feel as though the tea room weren't necessary, somehow."
"Gretta's right," said Margery. "There is something in the air that makes the tea room seem like a side issue. Yet no one could have been more in earnest than we were about it. And we have helped mother a great deal with its results this winter. Oh, I suppose we imagine it. It really isn't important that we close the room for those three days. It will go on just the same, and we are a little tired. That is what Aunt Keren saw, probably. Yet there is a stir in the air—as if something were going to happen."
Margery pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her breast as she spoke, having shaken it out of the box where it lay with twenty-three of its sisters, and smiled at her reflection, without seeing it.
"Something good, I hope," said Happie.
"Good? Oh, yes! Nothing but the best of good things happens to the Scollards lately! I hope we are grateful enough. I don't feel as though there were enough of me to be as grateful as I ought to be," Margery responded.
"A full teacup is as full as a full ocean, Margery. I think we're grateful in the best way when we're happy," said Happie, perhaps more wisely than she knew. "Now if you two big girls are ready we'll go and help motherums with the little girls, and be off to our mixed-tea room party, as Bob calls it."
It was an unusual party, "but that was no harm," as Polly sensibly pointed out. In the first place parties are not usually held in tea rooms, nor do they combine the oldest with the youngest child, and all the ages between, flanked by two mothers, as in this case. Mrs. Charleford came with Edith. Mrs. Scollard accepted her invitation with more pleasure than any one else, perhaps, because she "so rarely had a chance to see her flock frolic by daylight," as she said herself.
Mrs. Gordon was asked, but could not come. Ralph and Snigs represented the family, unsuspecting Margery's plot to increase their family joy, or rather to widen it. Happie had caught all three of her E's without an engagement, as it chanced. Little Serena Jones-Dexter came with her nurse, looking very white and pathetic. She had sprained her ankle and could not enjoy the party except as a spectator. She had so strongly set her heart upon coming that her doting grandmother had not had the courage to say her nay, so Serena came in state, borne in by a footman, attended by her nurse. She was ensconced in pillows in the very centre of the room in the biggest of chairs where she could see everything, poor little patient bit of childhood, with the big eyes and the beautiful little white face.
It was a holiday, of course, and the girls had felt sure that no one would try to visit the tea room, but hardly had the guests all arrived when some one did turn the door handle and in walked Hans Lieder. He stopped short as he saw the assemblage and took off his wide brimmed hat with a profound bow.
"A thousand pardons, young ladies," he said. "I see that this room is not this room to-day. I did not know."