“I thought I heard the three train stop at the crossing,” broke in the high, hard voice.
“No such thing! I noticed particularly.”
“Nonsense! You were so busy watching that Sutton boy racing by in his car that you didn’t even know it was train time. What John Sutton means by letting that boy drive that car I can’t see. He isn’t more than fourteen——”
“Fourteen! Ella Grant, you have lost your senses! He is twenty, if he is a day. I remember perfectly well that he was born during the Spanish war.”
“Certainly! That was just fourteen years ago.”
The girls couldn’t help laughing. It happened that it was eighteen years since the Spanish war, as our history scholar, Lucy, had just learned. That seemed to be the way the sisters hit the mark: one shooting far in front, one far behind.
“We had better knock,” whispered Helen, “or they will begin to break up the china soon.”
She accordingly beat a rat-tat on the open front door of the old house.
“Someone is knocking!” exclaimed the contralto.
“Not at all! It’s a woodpecker,” put in the treble.