Leighton looked her over. "Oh! very well--Betty will make trifle."

Betty looked as though she would drop into tears. Elma put her hand through her arm and whispered while the others debated about cakes, "I can find out all about trifles. Miss Grace knows. She made them cen--centuries ago, and Miss Annie never lets the new cooks try."

Betty turned on her a happy face.

"Oh, Elma, you're most reviving," she said gratefully.

Then they had cakes to consider. Now and again they had been allowed to bake cakes, and they felt that here they were on their own ground.

Betty revived in a wonderful manner, and immediately insisted on baking a gingerbread one.

"n.o.body eats gingerbread at parties," said Mabel in a disgusted voice.

"This isn't a picnic we're arranging, or a school-room tea. It's a grown-up party, and we just aren't going to have gingerbread."

"Yet I've sometimes thought that gingerbread at a party tasted very well," remarked Mrs. Leighton.

"Oh, mummy!" Mabel seemed very sorry for her mother.

But Betty had regained her confidence.

"I shall bake gingerbread," she exclaimed in her most dogged manner.

"There are always the rabbits, of course," said Jean, with her nose in the air.

"Girls, girls," said Mrs. Leighton.

"Gingerbread one, walnut cream cake another. What will you bake, Jean?"

"Orange icing," quoth Jean.

"And sponge cake cream for Elma," she added in a thoughtful way.

"I do like the way you fling all the uninteresting things at me,"

exclaimed Elma. "I think sponge cake cream is the moistest, flabbiest, silliest cake I know. We're putting cream in everything. Everybody will be sick of cream. Why can't I bake a coffee cake?"

"Why can't she?" asked Mrs. Leighton severely.

"Coffee cake, Elma," said Mabel. She had taken to paper and pencil. "I only hope we shall know what it is when it appears!"

"And you'd better all begin as soon as you can," said Mrs. Leighton; "so that we find out where we are a few days before the party occurs."

She still looked with foreboding on the whole arrangement.

Cook preserved a hauteur on the subject of the invasion, through which the girls found it very hard to break.

"Never seed such a picnic," she informed the housemaid. "My, you should have been here when Miss Betty burned her gingerbread!"

That was a sad occasion, and after all, there was nothing for it but the rabbits. Betty moaned over the lost raisins, the "ginger didn't count."

"I stoned every one of them," she sighed. Mr. Leighton found some brown lumps in the rabbit hutches. "That's not the thing for these beasts,"

he said; "what is it?" And Betty explained that it would be quite safe for them, for (once more) hadn't she stoned every raisin herself?

"I'm glad you're a millionaire, John," said Mrs. Leighton grimly when she heard about it.

Elma made Betty try again. Elma's heart was in her mouth about her own performances, but she hung over Betty till a success was secured to the gingerbread. Then she couldn't get the kitchen for her coffee cake, because Mabs, in a neat white ap.r.o.n and sleeves, was ornamenting a ragged-looking structure of white icing with little dabs of pink, and trying to write "Cuthbert" in neat letters across the top. She had prepared a small cake--"just to taste it." They all tasted. It seemed rather crumply.

"Isn't there a good deal of walnut in it?" asked Mrs. Leighton humbly.

"It's nearly all walnut," said Mabel. "I like walnut."

Jean worried along with her piece.

"n.o.body will survive this party," said she.

At last Elma's coffee cake got its innings. She was so nervous after the gingerbread fiasco that only the ultimate good humour of Cook saved her.

"Don't hurry over it, Miss Elma; it's coming nicely. I'll tell you when to stop beating."

Nothing else would have guaranteed the existence of the cake. Cook also saw to the firing. This gave Elma such a delightful feeling of grat.i.tude that she opened out her heart on the subject of meringues.

Cook said that of course it was easy for them "as had never tried" just to rush in and make meringues the first thing. The likes of herself found them "kittlish" things. You may make meringues all your life, and then they'll go wrong for no reason at all. It was "knack" that was wanted princ.i.p.ally.

"Do you think I've got knack, Cook?" asked Elma humbly.

Cook gave her a clear night in the kitchen for the meringues, as a reward for her humility. It was marvellous that nearly all of them came fairly decently. Cook found the shapes "a bit queer," but "them as knew"

who was providing the party wouldn't think they were "either here or there."

"I'll make it up with the cream," quoth Elma happily. A great load was off her mind.

She now devoted herself to Betty's trifle. As a great triumph they decided to provide a better trifle than even Cook knew how to prepare.

Miss Grace entered heartily into the plan. They were allowed to call one morning when she was ensconced in the parlour. Saunders brought in solemnly, first, several sheets of white paper. These were laid very seriously on the bare finely-polished table. Then came a plate of sponge cake in neat slices, a thin custard in a gla.s.s jug, several little dishes, one of blanched almonds cut in long strips, another of halved cherries, one of tiny macaroon biscuits, and so on. Miss Grace set herself in a high chair, and proceedings began. Elma wondered to the end of her days what kind of a cook Miss Grace would have made if she had been paid for her work. Everything was prepared for Miss Grace, but she took an hour and a quarter to finish the trifle. She added custard in silver spoonfuls as though each one had a definite effect of its own, and she several times measured the half gla.s.sful of cordial which was apportioned to each layer of sponge cake. The ceremony seemed interminable. Elma saw how true it was what her father often said, that one ought always to have a big enough object in life to keep one from paying too much importance to trifles. She immediately afterwards apologized to herself for the pun, which, she explained in that half world of dreaming to which she so often resorted, she hadn't at all intended.

Elma and Betty, however, to the end of their days, never forgot how to make trifle.

Betty's trifle was a magnificent success.

Jean engaged a whole fruiterer's shop, as it seemed, for her salad, and found she made enough for forty people out of a fourth of what she had ordered. This put Mrs. Leighton back into her old prophetic position.

Had she not told Jean a quarter of that fruit would be enough?

Mabel arranged everything in good order for her chicken concoction, and at last had only the mayonnaise to make. That occurred on the afternoon of the party. Cuthbert and Harry and Mr. Maclean were all about--supposed to be helping. May Turberville, Betty's great friend, and her brother Lance, a boy of fourteen, brought round various loans in the way of cups and cream and sugar "things." The table in the dining-room was laid for supper with a most dainty centre-piece decked with roses and candelabra. Most of their labours being over, the company retreated to the smoke-room, where "high jinks" were soon in process. Lance capered about, balancing chairs on his nose, and doing the wild things which only take place in a smoke-room.

In the midst of it appeared Mabel, wide-eyed and distressed, at the door. The white ap.r.o.n of a few days ago was smeared with little elongated drops of oily stuff. She held a fork wildly dripping in her hand.

"Oh--oh, isn't it awful," she cried, "the mayonnaise won't may."

It was the last anxiety, and, in the matter of the pints of the Leighton girls, quite the last straw. Just when they had begun to be confident of their party, the real backbone of the thing had given out.

Dr. Harry removed a cigarette from his lips.

"Hey--what's that?" he asked. "Mayonnaise--ripping! I knew an American Johnnie who made it. Bring it here, and we'll put it right."

Mabel spread her hands mutely. "In this atmosphere?" she asked.