"We ain't agoin' home till we get our presents. Yer know what ma said."
This aside was so plainly audible to the host and hostess, that Elizabeth looked shocked, but Val roared with laughter.
"Very well," said Elizabeth; "we will play jack-stones."
But at the first throw Val, in the exuberance of his feelings, tossed them so high that one landed on the table, right in the centre of one of Miss Herrick's delicate china plates, breaking it squarely in two.
"My eye!" exclaimed the boy. "What have I done?"
"Jack-stones are a hateful game, anyhow," cried Elizabeth, whose dismay caused her to forget her manners. "I don't know what Aunt Caroline will say. It is all your fault, Eva Louise, that Val broke the plate, for you made us play jack-stones."
"'Tain't, neither," returned Eva Louise, with asperity. "No one didn't tell him to throw the jack up there. An' ef this is what yer call a party, I don't think much of it. We hev as good pie as that at home, an' we can get ice-cream o' the ice-cream man any day he comes round. I say, Bella, let us go home."
But Bella still held back. Elizabeth looked at them for a moment in silent wrath, and then her feelings found words.
"Well, I should be very glad indeed if you did go home. I think you are very rude girls. And I never knew you had ice-cream whenever you wanted it, and all those nice things."
"No more we do," interposed Bella; "leastways, I never seen it. Eva Louise was makin' that up, I guess."