Matty turned surprised eyes to him. “Why, I ate four, and May ate—how many did you eat, May?”
“Only three to-day,” was the virtuous reply. “Sometimes I eat five. They’re rather small dumplings, Tad. But to-day I—I began to feel bored quite soon.”
“I should think so! I’d be ‘bored’ after two of the things, I guess,” said Tad with a grin. “I think a walk is just what you girls need.”
“I suppose dumplings are a little indigestible,” acknowledged Matty. “But they’re awfully good. Norah puts lots of cinnamon in with the apple and we have just heaps of hard sauce. I think, May, that there were several left over. They’d be nice cold for supper, wouldn’t they?”
“Talk about a boy’s appetite!” said Tad despairingly. “Gee, we don’t know anything about stuffing ourselves, do we, Rod?”
“How would it do,” suggested Rodney, “if we—if we had those cold dumplings when we get back?”
Matty and May clapped their hands and laughed. Tad smiled and winked at Rodney. “Not a bad idea, that,” he answered. “Just to keep the twins from killing themselves, eh?”
When they were a good two miles into the country, with the river lying below them silver-blue in the afternoon sunlight, Matty announced that she was no longer bored. May, too, thought she had recovered from her affliction, and so they wheeled around and started homeward, those cold dumplings seeming to beckon from the distance. When they got back to the house Mrs. Binner had finished her nap and had retired to her room upstairs and there was no longer any necessity for keeping quiet. The twins left the two boys in the tumble-down summer-house and went on to find Norah. When, a few minutes later, they returned, they bore a tray on which were the cold dumplings, a generous portion of hard sauce, saucers and spoons, a pitcher of water and four tumblers. You just had to have water when you ate dumplings, May asserted. Cold apple dumplings may not appeal to the reader, especially when eaten out of doors on a late October afternoon with a westerly breeze sending shivers up and down one’s spine in spite of a heavy sweater, but they tasted awfully good to the boys, and even May and Matty managed, without much apparent effort, to dispose of one apiece. Finally, surfeited, they laid the remains of the feast aside and sank back in comfort.
“How do you feel, Tad?” asked Rodney with a sigh of repletion.