But Aunt Jessica, without the least surprise in her voice, responded promptly: "Why, yes! We have three hours free now, and it seems a crime to stay in the house."
Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty in understanding. She jumped up and down and cried: "Oh, goody! goody! We're going to take our dinner out! We're going to take our dinner out! Isn't it _jolly_?"
She was standing in front of Elliott as she spoke, and the girl felt that some reply was expected of her. "Why, can we? Where do we go?" she asked, exactly as though she expected to see a hotel spring up out of the ground before her eyes.
"Lots of days we do," said Priscilla. "We'll find a nice place. Oh, I'm glad it takes peas three whole hours to can themselves. I think they're kind of slow, though, don't you?"
Laura noticed the bewilderment on Elliott's face. "Priscilla means that we are going to eat our dinner out-of-doors while the peas cook in the hot-water bath," she explained. "Don't you want to pack up the cookies? You will find them in that stone crock on the first shelf in the pantry, right behind the door. There's a pasteboard box in there, too, that will do to put them in."
"How many shall I put up?" questioned Elliott.
"Oh, as many as you think we'll eat. And I warn you we have good appetites."
Those were the vaguest directions, Elliott thought, that she had ever heard; but she found the box and the stone pot of cookies and stood a minute, counting the people who were to eat them. Four right here in the kitchen and five--no, six--out-of-doors. Would two dozen cookies be enough for ten people? She put her head into the kitchen to ask, but there was no one in sight, so she had to decide the point by herself. After nibbling a crumb she thought not, and added another dozen. And then there was still so much room left that she just filled up the box, regardless. Afterward she was very glad of it. She wouldn't have supposed it possible for ten people to eat as many cookies as those ten people ate after all the other things they had eaten.
By the time she had finished her calculations with the cookies, Aunt Jessica and Laura and Priscilla were ready. When Elliott emerged from the pantry, the little car was at the kitchen door, with a hamper and two pails of water in it, and on the back seat a long, queer-looking box that Laura told Elliott was a fireless cooker.