She laughed lightly. "By Christmas you will have forgotten all about me! Anyway, you will have Miss Denny."
With wicked delight over his embarrassment Nancy told him of Nonie's plan that Miss Denny should be Mr. Peter's "dearest."
"Your fate is as plain as the nose on my face," she laughed, tantalizingly. "You won't have to cross my palm with silver to know your future, Mr. Hyde! A cottage on the ten-acre piece where you will live happily--ever afterward. As a wedding gift, with my best wishes, I'll give you the Bird's-Nest."
She dodged the drum-stick that Peter threw at her. "You are not at all grateful for the nice fortune I'm giving you," she declared.
"I am, indeed! Though it doesn't seem quite fair for me to make too many plans without consulting Miss Denny, and I've never seen the lady. She may be old and ugly, black--or yellow."
"I'll tell you--if you'll promise not to tell that I've told! She _is_ old and ugly; she's blind in one eye and stutters and limps and has straggly gray hair and----"
"For Heaven's sake, stop! When all my life I've been looking for a girl with brown hair that looks sort of red and freckles--about three thousand of them!"
"Peter!" Nancy sprang precipitously to her feet. "Look--there is a storm coming!"
B'lindy's threatened storm was approaching swiftly. The black cloud that had been piling up behind them now overspread the whole western sky. "What a shame--to have it spoil our day! This has been such fun. I'll never forget it, after I've gone." Then, hastily, "Gather up the napkins and the baskets; I promised B'lindy I'd bring them home! Isn't there a short cut home? I'm really dreadfully afraid of lightning." But she had caught something in the expression of Peter Hyde's face that frightened her more than the threatened storm.
"Let's hurry," she cried, running unceremoniously to the automobile.
Real need recognizing no distinction of class, it had been Liz Hopworth who had been summoned to the Hopkins home when Mrs. Hopkins "dropped off" in the middle of the night, leaving ten children motherless.
Over Dan'l's late breakfast Liz, wan-eyed from loss of sleep, but dignified by a new importance, related all the sad circumstances of poor Sarah Hopkins' passing. "Who'd a' _thought_," she exclaimed as she vigorously beat her pan-cake batter, "yesterday when I see the poor woman out a hangin' her clothes that this blessed night I'd a' been called in to straighten her limbs and do for those poor young 'uns!"