"Dorée always wanted to touch one nose—Whoop-la's nose, but with his claw," observed Snigs. "Polly, please take out my veil pin; it's caught in my curls."
As Snigs stooped, Polly loosened his veil, quite convulsed over this remark, for Snigs' hair was as short and straight as hair well could be. Polly considered Ralph and Snigs the funniest boys in the world, and approaching to Bob as the best boy.
"Your mother has gone away, you said? For the day?" asked Mrs. Scollard. And as the Gordon boys assented, she cried: "Then we will have a long, cozy shut-in day! You are both to dine with us—roast beef, Gretta's prize mashed potatoes, and any other vegetables you choose from our fertile garden of tins in the pantry. And salad—that is Happie's specialty! I will make tomato soup since it is so cold and blustering, and perhaps, if you are all very, very good, a spicy, plummy steamed pudding, if we can coax Margery to give us one of her foamy sauces! I think we can defy the weather, even the wind and the weather. I have a volume of stories that no one can resist for the afternoon. Why, we shall have the best kind of a cozy, uneventful home day!"
"We always have the best kind of home days with you, dear Mrs. Scollard," said Ralph, dropping his nonsense to beam gratefully at this dear woman.
"It's nice sometimes to know no one can come," remarked Laura with her back to the others as she looked out of the window at the dreary street. And as she spoke the bell rang.
"Who can it be! It's the lower bell. Polly, go touch the button, like the duck you are!" cried Happie. "I don't see how it can be company, on such a morning and Sunday besides." She went towards the door to be ready to open it when the bold adventurer should have come up the three flights of stairs which intervened between the street and the Patty-Pans.
It was so long before the person appeared that the Scollards began to think their bell had been rung by mistake, and Happie went out to see if there were any one on the way up. She put her head in at the door again.
"Yes, some one is coming," she said. "A woman all wrapped up so that I can't tell whether or not it is some one we know. And she comes as slow as she can move."
It sounded mysterious, and the Scollards within the flat listened eagerly for the first word from their representative at the door which should give them a clue to this arrival.