And now,” as Albert would say, here we are, for a comfort, back at Windsor, and just in time, too, for there is something special on hand. And somebody else is just in time as well—somebody who was not expected, and who, I fear, is not wanted. Marie-Celeste, seated in the library window, and busy in transferring some great luscious strawberries from a plate on the seat beside her to a basket in her lap, is the first to discover a familiar little figure turning in at the gate. “Bother!” she exclaims, her pretty face all of a scowl.
“What's the matter?” asks Harold, who is on his knees on the floor, trying to make some very stiff wrapping-paper accommodate itself to the edges and corners of a generous box of luncheon, and is: quite too preoccupied to look up.
“Bother enough! Who do you suppose is coming up the path as large as life? Albert, if you please, and he's all alone, and that means that Margaret has left him at the corner, and that he has come to spend the day.”
“Bother I say too,” exclaims Harold; “we can't send him home, and with Aunt Lou up in London, there's no one to leave him with here, and of course we can't take him. Oh, why did he happen to come to-day!”
But the truth of it was that Albert had not happened to come at all. His visit had been deliberately planned for precisely this hour. Could any one suppose for a moment, that he could hear all the beautiful plans fora Knight-of-the-Garter day discussed in his presence, and never make an effort to have a hand in it? To be sure, the children had tried to keep the date a close-guarded secret, but Albert had got wind of it, all the same; and here he was, bright and fresh as the day itself, marching up the path, his little blue sacque folded carefully over one arm, and an inviting luncheon hamper swinging from the other. Fortunately, considering the ungracious mood of the two children in the library, his first encounter chanced to be with Donald, who, arrayed in the white and blue of his summer sailor-suit, was bending over the pansy bed, gathering a few “beauties” into a bunch for Marie-Celeste; and so absorbed in his task was he that he did not hear Albert's tread upon the walk. “Why, where did you come from?” he said, looking up surprised.
“Of course you knowed where I tum from, Donald,” Albert replied in his literal fashion; “but where do you s'pose I'm doin'?”
“To London Town,” laughed Donald, to whom it had not occurred to regard Albert's arrival as likely to interfere with the day's programme.
“No; I'm doin' on your Knight-of-de-Garter party.”