When a birthday came around it was always a question whether it warranted the omission of lessons or not. Happie looked imploringly at her mother after dinner and said insinuatingly: "Polly was never ten years old until to-night, motherums! Don't you think we might mark the occasion by dropping all other lessons and taking up chemistry, demonstrating how heat changes butter, chocolate, milk and sugar into fudge?"
Mrs. Scollard hesitated and was lost. Penny leaped on her lap to hug her for a consent which she read in her mother's eyes, and Polly cried in a staid sort of rapture: "This will make my birthday perfect--dancing school and fudge!"
Flats are an invention for which to be grateful. Without them how would homes be possible to people with little strength, less income and no space? But they have their drawbacks, like everything else in an imperfect world, and not least of these is the way sounds and odors wander from one end of them to the other, owing to the arrangement which Happie had called "the Patty-Pan style of architecture." No one can safely talk secrets in a flat, and no one can brew secret potions, for good intent or ill, in the most distant end of their elongated connections.
Happie had her specialty well under way in the little kitchen, and Laura, who was still under the spell of the wizard playing of the afternoon, found it impossible to keep to her seat at the piano, or the composition of her song, in the fudge-burdened atmosphere of the little parlor. She gave it up, and was coming out to join the less gifted young folk in the kitchen when the bell rang through the little flat; the upper bell, so that whoever had come was already at the threshold, having entered the outer door without ringing below. Laura opened the door, and there stood Mrs. Barker and Elsie beautifully attired.
"Oh!" ejaculated Laura, and it was perfectly evident that her first feeling was dismay, not welcome, her consciousness of the odor of fudge overwhelming hospitality. "Yes, mamma is in. And Happie and Gretta, yes, Elsie," Laura said, rallying. "If you will please wait a moment, I will call them."
"I wish I could go out where Happie is. She's making fudge, I smell it, and we all know Happie's fudge of old," said Elsie.