“I am going to leave you girls up here for some days longer. Isn’t that enough for her to be grateful over?”
“We—ll, I don’t know—that sounds rather fishy.”
“And besides, I am going to send her up a ouija board to pass the hours away until I return. How about that?”
“Oh, now you are talking! That is something to be grateful about. We are all of us dying to try it,” but Dum could not see why Nan was blushing so furiously and evidently trying to hold in the giggles, and she plainly caught a wink passing between her dignified parent and the demure Nan.
“He’s up to something, but it wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of me to try to find out if he doesn’t want me to know,” she said to herself.
The Tucker Twins had been motherless since they were tiny babies and their ridiculously young father had had the rearing of them alone and unaided. Many stepmothers had been picked out for these irrepressible girls by well meaning friends and relatives, but Jeffry Tucker had remained unmarried, much to the satisfaction of the said twins.
“He is much too young and inexperienced to marry,” they would say when the matter was broached by wily mammas who hoped to settle their daughters. And so he did seem to be. Time had no power to age Jeffry Tucker. He was in reality very young to be the father of these great girls, as the romance of his life had occurred when he was only twenty, still in college, and the little wife had died after only a year of happiness.
In rearing his girls he had had only one rule to go by: they must conduct themselves like gentlemen on all occasions. “I don’t know what ladylike rules are but I do know what is expected of a gentleman, and if my girls come up to that standard I am sure they will pass muster,” he had declared. As a rule the twins did pass muster. They were perfectly honorable and upright and the mischief they got into was never anything to be ashamed of—only something to be gotten out of, never too serious to tell their father all about.
The fact that they were to stay longer than the week-end was greeted with joy by the Carters. Page had already made herself popular, too. Douglas was soon informed by her mother that she had given up the trip to the White, so some of the load was lifted from the poor girl’s heart. There was much more talk, however, of the proposed debut and Helen upheld her mother in thinking that since Douglas was not going to college she must come out.