“For pity’s sake,” she said, in a loud whisper to Harry. “If they hain’t brought their looking-glass with ’em! There warn’t an atom of need. I sent one over, you know, and could send another as well as not. Better not undo ’em if they are nicely packed.” If Hal’s face had been scarlet when his aunt was called an “old cove,” it was purple now. He knew what was in the boxes, and that the sight of it would shock the old lady, who was the strongest kind of a W. C. T. U. A lie in what he thought a good cause was nothing to him, and getting her gradually to the door, he said: “It is not a mirror. It is Warner’s Safe Cure, which Tom has to take.”
“Oh,” his aunt rejoined, looking commiseratingly at Tom, who stood with his back to her, shaking with laughter. “Is it kidney? I have a splendid recipe for that, better than forty Warner’s; or maybe the doctor can give him something.”
“Yes, yes. I’ll let you know,” Hal said, getting rid of her as soon as possible.
Then he turned to his companions and found the hall empty. The mirror and kidney business had been the last straw, and the young men had hurried through the rear door of the hall out upon the grounds, where four of them were holding their sides, and “Peter the Great,” or “Little Pondy,” as he was more often called, was hopping up and down, first on one foot then upon the other, with his monocle, which had dropped from his eye, swinging in front of him like a pendulum.
“Rich!” he said. “I am beginning to enjoy myself immensely. Would she turn us out bag and baggage if she knew it was ‘Oh-be-joyful’?”
“Not from my house,” Hal answered, with an air of proprietorship; “but she is a strict temperance woman, and we’d better not let her know, if we can help it.”
Pondy, to whom the wine belonged, and who was the fastest of the set and the least of a gentleman, notwithstanding his wealth, looked askance. Dinner without wine would hardly be dinner, though he might perhaps get along with beer and visit the boxes afterward.
“The old lady will let me have beer, won’t she?” he asked.
“You mean my aunt, Mrs. Stannard?” Hal said, with a great deal of dignity, for the “old lady” offended him.
Pondy saw it and hastened to say: “Certainly, I beg your pardon. I mean your aunt, of course. It was a slip of the tongue. If you think best we’ll put the boxes in the cellar, where we can take a private nip now and then, and on our last night have the bottles up with a regular blow out. What do you say, boys?”