Whereupon this ridiculous girl with the impertinent nose flopped down on her knees on the sidewalk and made such comically repentant faces that all four giggled merrily.
"Get up, you goose," laughed Mabel. "Your apology is accepted."
"Come along with us," urged Jean. "We're going to have hot chocolate at our house. Mother is trying to fatten Marjory, Bettie and me."
"She seems to succeed best with--hum--no personal remarks, please. Dear maiden, I will inspect your home from the outside, but I regret that I'm strictly forbidden to go _in_side any strange house without my grandmother's permission. You'll have to call on me first. She is _very_ particular in such matters. But," added Henrietta, with a sudden twinkle, "I'm not. So, if you'll kindly rush in and make that chocolate, there's no earthly reason why I shouldn't stand just outside your gate and drink it."
"Oh," cried Bettie, "is it possible that you're Mrs. Howard Slater's new granddaughter?"
"I am," admitted Henrietta, "but I'm not so new as you seem to think. She has owned me for fourteen years. Now, hustle up that chocolate. I've just remembered that I'm to have a dress tried on at four. It is now half-past."
"BETTIE," asked Jean, when the girls were "hustling up" the chocolate in Mrs. Mapes' kitchen (the weather was now too cold for Dandelion Cottage to be habitable), "where did you find her?"
"At school," replied Bettie. "She comes in for Domestic Science. I've seen her about three times, and every time she's had that stiff Miss Rossitor laughing. You know who that girl is, don't you?"
"I've heard something," said Marjory, "but I can't just remember what, about some girl named Henrietta."
All the girls had seen Mrs. Slater, the beautifully gowned, decidedly aristocratic old lady with abundant but perfectly white hair and bright, sparkling black eyes. Mrs. Slater, who seemed a very reserved and exclusive person, had spent many summers and even an occasional winter in her own handsome home in Lakeville. She lived alone except for a number of servants; for both her son and her daughter were married. The son lived abroad, no one knew just where; and some four years previously Mrs. Slater's daughter, who was Henrietta's mother, had died in Rome. Since that event Henrietta had been cared for by her uncle's wife; and she had spent a winter in California and another in Florida with her grandmother, but this was her first visit to Lakeville. It was said that Henrietta's mother had left her little daughter a very respectable fortune, that her father, an English traveler of note, was also wealthy, and it was known to a certainty that Mrs. Howard Slater was a moneyed person.