“Finish your supper, Frances, and do not sit there with your bread in the air,” said Mrs. Townsend in a decided tone. “You forget that I am to be consulted as well as your father. And that’s not all. I’ve no idea that Dr. Gray, or Major Patten, or Mr. Jones, or Mrs. Abbott will consent to this camping out, as you call it; so you must not set your hearts on it, you and Flaxie.”
But it chanced that every one of the parents did consent at last; and one morning in the latter part of June you might have seen some very busy girls loading a push-cart and an express wagon, with the help of their brothers and Henry Mann, while Fanny laughed almost continually, and Mary Gray exclaimed at intervals,—
“O won’t it be a state of bliss?”
There were four bedsteads, eight chairs, one old sofa, one table, one rusty stove, a variety of old dishes,—not broken ones,—beside a vast amount of rubbish, which the mothers thought quite useless, but which the daughters assured them would be “just the thing for our charades.”
“I’m not going to Old Bluff to assist in such performances as charades, so you may just count me out,” said Preston, who was to take turns with Bert Abbott in being a nightly guest at Camp Comfort; since the parents would not consent that the girls should spend one night there alone.
“As if boys were the least protection,” said Lucy Abbott, Preston’s cousin.
“Still they may be useful in getting up games,” returned Sadie Patten hopefully. “And Jack Townsend’s cornet is charming.”
“So it is; it goes so well with your harmonica. And we’ll make the boys stir the ice cream,” said Lucy, the head housekeeper.