THE RED-LETTER DAY
"Hang the luck!" ejaculated Phil, flinging aside his book in disgust.
"Here it is, our first day over, and look at it!" And, drawing aside the
light chintz curtains, he disclosed a view that was, to say the least,
very discouraging.
The rain came down in torrents, rebounding from the shining pavement and
the no less shining umbrellas of passing pedestrians, with vicious little
pops and hisses that sounded more like a storm of tiny daggers than of
raindrops. As time went on, instead of lightening, the sky had grown
murkier and murkier and darker and darker, until, in many parts of the
hotel, people had been forced to turn on the lights. Over and about
everything hung that moist, indefinably depressing atmosphere that makes
one rail at fate and long for the blessing of the sun and a clear day.
Such was Phil's enviable state of mind as he dropped the curtain and
slumped back into his chair with an impatient grunt.
"'Tis rather mean, isn't it?" drawled Jessie, dropping her book and
looking at the disconsolate Phil lazily. "You don't happen to have any
more of those candies around you anywhere, do you, Evelyn?" she queried.
"Hardly. How long do you think they last when you're around?" answered
Evelyn, without raising her eyes from the magazine she was reading.
With a quick movement, Jessie reached over and pulled the candy box
toward her before Evelyn could interfere.
"A-ha, I thought so!" she cried. "I was sure they couldn't all have
vanished so quickly, you unscrupulous--"
"Beg pardon!" interrupted Evelyn, blandly.
"Well, you are, anyway," Jessie maintained. "What do you mean, no more
left? Here are half a dozen at least."
"Well, you know you've eaten half a box already, Jessie," Evelyn was
beginning, severely, when Jessie interrupted.
"But, Evelyn, what else is there to do on a day like this?" she pleaded
plaintively. "We can't make any noise, for fear that we'll annoy the
other people, and we can't go out----"
This was more than Phil could stand.
"Eat all the candy you want, Jessie, and when you've finished what you
have, I'll buy you some more," and he sauntered out, hands in pocket,
despite all his mother's training, and whistling mournfully.
"Seems to me you have him very well tamed, Jessie," gibed Evelyn. "Just
the same, I'm going to pray for clear weather."
"Why the sudden fervor?" asked Jessie, munching away happily.
"Because if you take Phil's advice and eat all the chocolates that you
want to while it rains, and it doesn't clear up soon--well, all I have to
say is----"
Jessie laughed, but added, more seriously, "I guess maybe you're right,
after all. There was a time when I'd nearly given up the habit, but now
I'm just about as bad as ever. I'm afraid our guardian might not like
it."
"Of course she wouldn't," said Evelyn, seizing upon the opportunity
eagerly. "Do you know, Jessie, there's been so much going on and so much
excitement that we have--well, rather lost sight of the camp-fire idea,
don't you think?"
"I was thinking just that very thing the other day," replied Jessie,
slowly, putting down a half-finished candy. "It ought to mean just as
much to us now, and more, for that matter, than it ever did before----"
"Girls, girls, girls!" sang out Lucile, bursting in upon them, with
cheeks like two red roses, and waving something white aloft in the air.
"We've got some letters, some beautiful, thick, booky letters, and you'll
never guess whom they're from."
The girls ran to the sofa, where Lucile had flung herself with a pile of
letters in her lap, and hung over the back of it excitedly.
"Oh, go on, Lucy; show them to us!" cried Evelyn, as Lucile put both her
hands teasingly over the letters, inviting them to "guess."
"If you don't hand over my property before I count five," threatened
Jessie, "I shall be compelled to use force."
"Well, in that case," laughed the threatened one, "I suppose I'll have
to----"
"Oh, Lucy, you know you always were my favorite che-ild," begged Evelyn,
melodramatically. "I'll destroy the old will and make a new one, leaving
everything----"
"To me," finished Jessie, at the same time making a lunge at the tempting
little pile of paper.
"Oh, go on!" cried Lucile, and, dodging out-stretched arms, made a dash
for the door, only to be captured and brought back by two indignant and
protesting girls to the sofa.
"Oh, we will be put out of the hotel," gasped Lucile, between laughs.
"We're making no end of noise. Now, if you two girls will only sit down
and behave like sensible--"
"Huh!" broke in Evelyn. "We were only demanding our just rights."
"You would better hasten, Lucile Payton," said Jessie, with her best
heavy-villain scowl. "My patience is dangerously near an end."
"All right," Lucile capitulated, patting the sofa on either side of her
invitingly. "Sit down here and I'll hand them out just as they come."
"And we'll read each one aloud before we open the next one," Jessie
suggested, eagerly.
"That's right," assented Evelyn. "Whom is the first one from, Lucy?"
"The first one," drawled Lucile, turning it up with aggravating
deliberation, "is for Evelyn, from----"
"Miss--er--our guardian," cried Evelyn, snatching the envelope
unceremoniously. "Oh, oh, oh! Got a letter opener, Lucy? Oh, all right;
anything. Hairpin? Thanks! Oh, girls, what has she got to say?"
"I might suggest that the best way to find out is to read it," said
Jessie, and immediately became the recipient of a withering stare from
Evelyn, who was opening the letter with trembling, clumsy fingers.
"My dear little girl," she read and then stopped and looked from one to
the other pleadingly. "I can't do it; I can't read it out loud----"
"Don't try," said Lucile, putting an arm around her. "I know exactly how
you feel. We would better read them first and compare notes afterward."
"That's right," agreed Jessie. "I didn't think how hard it would be to
read them out loud when I suggested it. Better give them all out
together, Lucy."
"Well, here's one to you from your mother, I guess, Jessie, and another
from your father, and one for you from your mother, Evelyn, and one for
me----"
"From whom?" interrupted Jessie.
"Our guardian," answered Lucile, touching it lovingly. "And here is
yours, Jessie," she added, handing her a letter in the well-known and
well-loved handwriting. "Isn't she dear to remember each one of us like
that? And oh, here are whole stacks of letters from the girls--one from
Margaret--here, Jess----" And so on until each had a little pile of her
own.
"And whom is that from, Lucy?" asked Evelyn, as Lucile picked up the last
letter, looked at the unfamiliar handwriting curiously, then looked again
more closely, while the tips of her ears became very pink.
"I--I don't know," she stammered. "It's for me, and--oh, well, I'll open
it later on," and she tucked it among the others, just to gain time, as
she explained it to herself.
"No, you don't! No, you don't!" cried Evelyn. "We have stumbled upon a
deep, dark mystery and it must be cleared up at once, at once. Come on,
Lucy; who wrote that letter?"
"I tell you I don't know myself, so how can I tell you?" cried Lucile,
angry at herself for being so confused.
"If you don't know whom it's from, why do you get all red and snappy and
try to hide it?" asked Evelyn, triumphantly. "'Fess up, Lucy. You might
as well, first as last, for you can't fool us."
"Methinks," began Jessie, in deep, stentorian tones, "that this writing
seems strangely familiar. Where can I have seen it before? Ah, I have
it!" Then, suddenly throwing her arms about Lucile in a strangling hug,
she cried, "Oh, I knew it, I knew it! I knew he would just go crazy about
you, like all the rest of us. He couldn't help himself! And you never,
never would believe anything could happen the way it does in
novels--oh--oh----"
"Oh, I see it all! I see it all!" shouted Evelyn, suddenly springing up
and whirling about the room, using her letters as a tambourine. "It's
Jessie's cousin! He's gone--he's gone----"
"Girls, you are crazy, both of you!" cried Lucile, extricating herself
with difficulty from Jessie's strangle hold and smoothing back the hair
that was tumbling down in the most becoming disorder--or so her two
friends would have told you--while her laughing eyes tried hard to look
severe. "Probably it isn't from him at all, and if it is, why--why--well,
it is," she ended, desperately.
"Why, of course it is," soothed Jessie; "but I don't think you need worry
about it not being from him----"
"Aren't you going to read it over now?" broke in Evelyn. "Then you can
tell us----"
"I wouldn't tell you a thing," said Lucile, driven to her last
entrenchment; "and what's more, I'm not going to read it till I get good
and ready, and not then if I don't want to," and she slipped her letter
into her pocketbook, which she closed with a defiant little snap. "Now,
what are you going to do about it?" she challenged, gaily.
"We might use force," mused Jessie, meditatively.
"But you're not going to, because you can't," Lucile declared, raising a
round little arm not yet wholly free from last summer's tan, for
inspection. "Just look at that muscle," she invited.
"Terrific!" cried Evelyn, in mock terror. "Guess we'd better think twice
before we tackle that, Jessie."
"Mere nothing!" sniffed Jessie, scornfully. "Now, if you want to see real
muscle----"
"Oh, yes; we know all about that," said Lucile, and, throwing an arm
about each of the girls, she dragged them over to the settee, saying
gaily, "What's the use of having all this fuss about one old letter, when
we have all the really good ones to read?"
The girls exchanged significant glances, but, never-the-less, followed
Lucile's example, opening one letter after another amid a shower of
exclamations, comments, questions and quotations from this or that
letter, till the other disturbing document was all but forgotten--except
by Lucile.
After half an hour of delightful reveling in the news from Burleigh,
which seemed so terribly far away, and in tender little messages from
mothers and fathers and friends, Lucile looked up from her guardian's
letter, which she had just read for the third time.
"Girls," she said, seriously, "I'm glad the letters came just as they did
this morning. I've been thinking----"
"So were we," broke in Evelyn, "just before you came in----"
"Wonderful!" murmured Jessie. "A red-letter day!"
The girls laughed, but Lucile went on:
"Just because we're over here, so far away from home, is no reason for
our forgetting or neglecting the least little bit the rules of our
camp-fire. In fact, I don't think we deserve any credit for being good
where Mrs. Wescott is; you simply can't help yourself when our guardian
is around."
"That's true enough," agreed Jessie, and for a few minutes they sat
silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in
their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded
before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in
camp--eating, swimming, walking, canoeing--subject always to the
slightest word or wish of their lovely, smiling, cheery guardian, who
always knew just what to do and just the time to do it.
"That's all right for me," began Jessie, heroically. "I've been eating
candies and drinking sodas and reading so much that my eyes are nearly
out of my head, but I don't know what under the light of the sun you two
have done."
"Well, in the first place, I've become horribly rude," confessed Lucile.
"We haven't noticed it," said Jessie.
"Well, I have," she went on. "This morning an old lady dropped her
handkerchief under my very eyes and I was in such a hurry to get to you
that I didn't stop to pick it up. And all my clothes need mending. That
good waist is all ripped where you yanked the button off, Evelyn----"
"Oh, I did not," began Evelyn, hotly.
"All right. I don't care who did it; the fact remains that it is torn and
I haven't mended it, and I haven't written half as much as I ought to,
and--well, if I told you everything, I wouldn't get through to-day."
"And I use slang from morning to night, and I chewed a piece of gum that
Phil gave me right out in the street, too," began Evelyn, miserably.
"Oh, Phil!" said Jessie, disdainfully. "He would ruin anybody's manners."
"All the more credit, then, in being good while he's around," laughed
Lucile. "But, seriously, girls, don't you think it would be a good plan
to make up our minds to act just the same all the time as though our
guardian were in the next room?"
"Let's" said the girls. And so, with no more form or ceremony, the simple
little compact was made, but it had taken firm and solid root,
nevertheless, in the girls' hearts.
"Hooray, people; here comes the sun!" cried Phil, bursting in upon them
with a box of candy and a radiant smile. "I just waylaid Dad and asked
him what was up if it cleared this afternoon, and he said, 'Westminster
Abbey, Trafalgar Square, a look at the Thames, an auto ride.' Hooray!"
The girls ran to the window, and, sure enough, the sun was beginning to
shine, feebly and mistily, to be sure, but yet unmistakably.
They hugged each other joyfully and began to gather up their scattered
belongings.
"It must be nearly lunch time," sang Lucile. "We'll go up and see what we
look like and change our dresses and----"
"Then for the fun," finished Evelyn.
"I say, Jessie, here's the candy I promised you," Phil called after her.
Jessie turned at the door and eyed the tempting box longingly.
"I'd love to, Phil," she said, "but I can't. Thanks just as much. I would
spoil my lunch," she added, lamely, making a hasty retreat.
"Well, of all the----" began Phil, at a loss to understand such insanity.
Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he voiced the eternal and
oft-repeated masculine query:
"Aren't girls the limit?"