Mrs. Scollard hastened to accept this invitation. She patted Penny's plump, country-browned little hand, as Margery lifted her into the high chair at her mother's side. She was a pretty mother—Margery was like her—and young still; it was no wonder that her children dropped into their old places around the table beaming with happiness at seeing her once more at its head, all her old look of weakness and weariness blown away somewhere beyond the Crestville mountains.
The hastily prepared lunch tasted very good and everybody was doing full justice to it, when there came a pounding from the direction of the little kitchen, which made Gretta drop her fork to cry: "What's that?" and sent Bob flying towards it with a partly articulate exclamation of: "Ralph and Snigs!"
"They always pound with a stick from their dumb-waiter door on ours, and then we go to the door—the front door—and let them in," explained Polly, in her rôle of instructress to Gretta.
This time such informality was not to obtain, however. Bob came back with a broad grin on his face and a note in his hand.
"They weren't there when I got there; they must have pounded, and then dropped on the floor when they heard me coming," he said to his family. "This note was pinned on our dumb-waiter door with a skewer."
He proceeded to unfold the note and read: "Mr. Ralph Gordon, Mr. Charles (alias Snigs) Gordon, present their compliments to Mrs. Charlotte Scollard, Miss Scollard, the Misses Keren-happuch, Laura, Mary and Penelope Scollard, Miss Gretta Engel and Mr. Robert Scollard, and request the pleasure of being allowed to call upon them at their earliest convenience. R. S. V. P."
Considering that the Gordon boys had been spending Thanksgiving at the farm, and had come down from it with the Scollards that very morning of the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, it really did not seem as if this formal note, nor even this pressing haste to see the family in the opposite flat, was necessary. Bob crumpled up the note, thrust it into his pocket and dashed out into the hall, where he beat a lively tattoo on the door across from the Patty-Pans' entrance, forgetting all about the rule of consideration for people above and below them, and crying: "Come on over now, you chumps! Come on over!"
Ralph and Snigs appeared, dodged Bob's affectionate blows, and came beaming into the dining-room where they shook hands all around with the Scollards from whom they had parted hardly an hour before, when they had all arrived from the train.