Suddenly, Nimpo held up her foot.
"Girls! look there!" Nimpo's tone was tragic.
The soles of her stockings were in awful holes! All eyes were instantly turned on her, and forty feet were simultaneously elevated to view. The tale was the same,—every stocking sole was black as the ground, and worn to rags!
"What will Ma say?" rose in horror to every lip.
This awful thought sobered them at once, and, finding it getting dark, shoes were hastily sought out of the pile in the corner, sun-bonnets donned, and slowly the long procession moved down the back stairs and out again into the street.
Nimpo flung herself on to the little bed in her room, and sighed with happiness.
"Oh! wasn't it splendid?—and I know mamma'll forgive my stockings. Besides, I'll wash them myself, and darn them."
(While I am about it, I may as well say that every girl who went to Nimpo's party had a long and serious task of darning the next week.)
When it was all over, and Mrs. Primkins and Augusta, assisted by two or three neighbors, had washed and returned dishes, brought down tables and chairs, swept out front hall, and reduced it to its normal condition of dismal state, to be seen and not used, and the neighbors had gone, and it was nine o'clock at night, Augusta sat down to reckon up debts, while Mrs. Primkins "set the bread."
Augusta brought out her account, and read: "Mrs. A., blank loaves of bread, ditto cake, one dish preserves; Mrs. B., ditto, ditto; Mrs. C., ditto, ditto."