CHAPTER XI.
DINING OUT.
Miss Pike had “a kind of a way with her,” as Mary expressed it, which was charming alike to old and young and rich and poor. In the three days she spent at Camp Comfort she won the hearts of the Pecks, who lived half a mile at the left; also the hearts of the Browns, who lived half a mile at the right. And across the river, in that benighted red cottage, her presence was felt like a full beam of sunshine.
She was interested at once in poor, wretched, overworked little Pecielena, who, she saw, was far superior to her vagabond brothers and sisters. She told the Quintette she would like to become better acquainted with the child, and suggested asking her over to the camp to dinner. Pecielena had never even knocked at their door since the night of the hailstorm; but Mary espied her at a distance with her milk-pail, and ran up to her, saying, with beaming good will,—
“Pecy, we’ll let you come to our house to dinner to-morrow if you want to!”
Some people might not have considered this a very cordial invitation, but Pecy was more than satisfied with it, and, as her mother had been won by Miss Pike, there was no objection made to her going.
“What, eat dinner at that house! Would the girls let her sit down with them at the table?” she wondered, feeling as if a star had dropped at her feet.
Meanwhile Dr. and Mrs. Gray had arrived, their carriage fairly loaded with eatables, a huge plum pudding riding between them, to make room for which little Ethel had to be perched at their feet on a cricket. It was Dr. Gray’s first vacation, and he would have preferred a day at the seaside; but when he heard that the Quintette would “break camp” in another week, he decided to visit Old Bluff and make Mary happy.
“How good you are, papa, and how I love you!” said she, springing into his arms, while the girls rolled the dainties out of the carriage like peas out of a pod.
“Oh, mamma!” said she, when she had her mother to herself at last in her own hammock, “we are going to have that heathen I told you of to dinner. And I haven’t said one word to Miss Pike about my giving her my pin-money, not one word. There are three poor families,—Jack calls them a ‘peck of brown pancakes;’ he means the Pecks, and Browns, and Pancakes, you know. And the girls want to do something for all of them, and I suppose they think I’m cold-hearted and stingy.”
“Well, you don’t like them to think that, do you?”