So Miss Marilla had hastened into the city to consult a friend who worked in the Red Cross and went out often to the wharves to meet the incoming boats. This friend promised to find out just when Dick’s division was to land, to hunt him up herself, and to see that he had the invitation at once. “See that he _came_,” she put it, with a wise reservation in her heart that the dear, loving soul should not be disappointed.
And now, the very night before, this friend had called Miss Marilla on the telephone to say that she had information that Dick’s ship would dock at eight in the morning. It would probably be afternoon before he could get out to Springhaven; so she had better arrange to have dinner about half past five. So Miss Marilla, with shining eyes and heart that throbbed like a young girl’s, had thrown her cape over her shoulders and hastened in the twilight through the hedge to tell Mary Amber.
Mary Amber, trying to conceal her inward doubts, had congratulated Miss Marilla and promised to come over the first thing in the morning to help get dinner. Promised also, after much urging, almost with tears on the part of Miss Marilla, to stay and help eat the dinner afterward in company with Miss Marilla and the young lieutenant. From this part of her promise Mary Amber’s soul recoiled, for she had no belief that the young leopard with whom she had played at the age of ten could have changed his spots in the course of a few years, or even covered them with a silver bar. But Mary Amber soon saw that her presence at that dinner was an intrinsic part of Miss Marilla’s joy in the anticipation of the dinner; and, much as she disliked the position of being flung at the young lieutenant in this way, she promised. After all, what did it matter what he thought of her anyway, since she had no use for him? And then, she could always quietly freeze him whenever Miss Marilla’s back was turned. And Mary Amber _could_ freeze with her hazel eyes when she tried.
So quite early in the morning Miss Marilla and Mary Amber began a cheerful stir in Miss Marilla’s big sunny kitchen, and steadily, appetizingly, there grew an array of salads and pies and cakes and puddings and cookies and doughnuts and biscuits and pickles and olives and jellies; while a great bird stuffed to bursting went through the seven stages of its final career to the oven.