“Nollsie! Nollsie!” Before he could answer the little maid, some one called from the kitchen porch. “I’m going to make the icing now—you can come and help, if you like.” Looking up from the strawberry-patch, one could see Ellen, pink-cheeked and swayingly girlish in her blue cotton frock. “Why, Nollsie Verplanck!” As she caught sight of the overalls her laugh rang out as Knollys had almost forgotten it used to ring. “Whatever are you doing?”
“There—run along, quick!” Gladys-Marie took the trowel from him with an impetuous hurry. “Don’t che see? She wants ye t’ help her!—-- ’N’ what I was ever s’ cross-eyed ’s to call her plain for, it ’ud take a couple o’ Con-an Doyles t’ tell me! Don’t it beat Paree how some people c’n get all their best points brought out by chambray at ’leven cents th’ yard?” And Gladys-Marie looked up wistfully at the two just disappearing into the kitchen. She would have liked to go in and make icing with them, as she often did with Lady Elinore; but something back of her pompadour reminded that she was merely a maid. So she sighed, and went on weeding Lady Elinore’s strawberry-patch.
In the kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. Knollys Verplanck (of Wall Street and Marble Court) sat opposite each other, with a big yellow bowl between them. The blue of Mr. Verplanck’s overalls exactly matched the blue of Mrs. Verplanck’s cotton frock.
“Great eye for color, Anne and Michael, ain’t they?” reflected Mr. Verplanck, mildly, as he sifted sugar into white of egg, with some absorption. “But a blessed good thing they left some of their clothes around. Ours are rather—er—too exotic for this atmosphere.”
“Well, one could hardly bake a cake in white broadcloth, could one?” defended Mrs. Verplanck, as though an excuse demanded itself.
“I never knew one could bake a cake at all,” returned her husband, watching the clever white hands admiringly.
“Mother taught me before I was married; but of course at the hotel——”
“Exactly.” There was something so suggestive in Knollys’s complete understanding that Mrs. Knollys glanced at him suspiciously from under her thick black lashes.
“Anyway, we go back on Monday,” she reassured herself, aloud. “I—it will seem natural to have some one to order about once more, won’t it? With this Gladys-Marie I find myself falling quite into Anne’s lax indulgence—why, do you know, Nollsie, this morning I even dusted the hall for her, and sewed a fresh frill on her cap. Fancy!”
“I suppose that’s what Anne does while Michael’s writing books,” fancied Knollys, dropping vanilla with fascinated attention. “Rather fun, isn’t it?”