Winona of the Camp Fire Part 51

Louise was as good as her word. She was back in a very few minutes, and in Winona's room again. She found her friend standing in the middle of the floor, her dress exactly what it had been when she left.

"Better hurry," warned Louise. "We haven't overmuch time."

"Hurry!" said Winona despairingly. "How can I? Do you know what I've done? I've hung away every single thin dress I own in the wardrobe, instead of putting them in the wash. I knew there was something I'd forgotten, and I couldn't think what it was."

"Oh, how dreadful!" said Louise. "You'll have to put on something gorgeous, to match the boys' clothes."

"What can I do?" asked Winona sadly, and swung open the doors of her wardrobe. There, crumpled, forlorn, dejected, hung a line of dresses each hopelessly past wearing in its present state.

"Isn't that a nice trick for a Camp Fire Girl?" inquired Winona scornfully. "It's the kind of thing you'd lecture a Blue Bird kindly but firmly for doing, and make her see what a wreck she was going to make of her whole life if she kept on."

"Never mind," said Louise soothingly. "You've had so many other things to do, it's no wonder you couldn't remember that. Haven't you anything but wash dresses? Where's your yellow silk voile?"

"I _did_ remember that!" said Winona with a reluctant grin. "I sent it to the cleaner's day before yesterday. It won't be done till Sat.u.r.day."

"What about your flowered dimity? Is all the freshness out of that? You don't wear it often."

"I sent for it from camp, for one of the girls to use in the Samantha tableaux, and the girl still has it, I suppose. She never gave it back.

I forgot to ask for it, in the hurry of getting home. There's no use trying to think. I've thought and thought, and everything else is too hot to wear, or soiled. There's nothing for it but a s.h.i.+rtwaist and skirt."

"Anything of mine would be up to your knees, and baggy," said Louise thoughtfully. "Wait a minute, Win, till I think."

"I'll do my hair while you're at it," said Winona.

"Why couldn't you borrow something of your mother's?" was Louise's next thought.

"Mother wears long dresses," said Winona. "If she didn't I could-I'm nearly her build."

"Couldn't you pin them up?"

"I declare, I believe I'll try," exclaimed Winona daringly. She ran out of the room, while Louise went on with her own dressing, and came back in a minute with a fresh, silk-lined black organdy over her arm.

"This is all there is for it," she said. "Mother would be willing, I know, if she were here. She always wants me to wear her things."

"It's lovely," said Louise admiringly, as Winona's pink cheeks and blue eyes appeared above the soft black, "but I'm afraid we'll hurt it if we put pins in it."

"I won't pin it up, then," said Winona. "The guests will never know the difference. I don't suppose father has mentioned my age."

"You'll look awfully old!"

"I don't care! Have you any black hair-ribbons you could let me have, Louise? I see where I never get the honor bead for not borrowing, by the way!"

"You won't lose it on account of my ribbons," said Louise, "because I haven't any. But I don't believe hair-ribbons and your gown would match.

Did you know you had a train?"

"No!" said Winona joyfully. She loved "dressing up," and this was beginning to look very much like it. "I'll do my hair up on top of my head, and n.o.body'll think I'm younger than twenty!"

"Good!" said Louise, and helped. They wound the goldy-brown ma.s.s up on the very top, and completed the effect by hunting out a pair of plain gla.s.s eye-gla.s.ses, which Tom had brought from the ten-cent store once long ago.

"You look twenty-five anyway!" exclaimed Louise, and Winona fitted the gla.s.ses on her nose and a.s.sumed a severe expression to match. "Put your hair back off your forehead-that way.... That's splendid!"

"I do look old!" said Winona, with a pleased expression. She trained up and down the room and looked at herself in the gla.s.s. "I'll go down now."

"I'll be there in a minute," said Louise. "Don't wait for me."

When Winona sailed down in her disguise to put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to the table she found that Tom was already dressed, and was standing meekly at the head of the board. And also he had found time to decorate it.

"How do you like it?" he asked in a tone even meeker than his att.i.tude.

Winona looked, pulled off her gla.s.ses in order to see better, looked again-and dropped down in a hopeless heap in the opposite chair. She did not say anything-the situation was beyond words.

"Don't you like it?" said Tom again sweetly.

"Like it!" said Winona, beginning to giggle.

Four half-barrel hoops had been wreathed in smilax, and arched across the table at regular intervals, one at each end and one between each two places. In the middle of the table, completely hiding the olives, lay a half-opened gridiron, also wound with smilax. It was all very neatly done, for Tom was very neat-handed; but the general effect was rather startling.

"It-why, it looks like somebody's grave!" said Winona protestingly.

Her tone was so stern that Puppums rose from beneath the table and tried nervously to hide under the sideboard, revealing as he went a decoration of smilax round his neck, continued in a garland down his spine, fastened at the tail. He did not seem to like it.

"That's what it is!" said Tom complacently, as Winona pounced on the abject dog and unwreathed him. "Here's the magazine I got it from. You said to. All there was in this month's copy was a page of neat and inexpensive grave decorations. I copied the handsomest one in the bunch, 'William R. Hicks; complete cost of decoration three dollars and twenty cents.' That thing in the middle's a Gates Ajar, or the nearest I could get to it. It got a prize, too."

"Do you suppose I want William R. Hicks's grave, or anybody's grave, on the table when we're having a special hand-made dinner that I've spent most of the afternoon on?" demanded his sister, laughing in spite of her objections.

"What's the row?" asked Billy cheerfully, appearing in the door with an armful of roses and ferns.

"I followed Win's directions about the table, and she doesn't seem to like it," said Tom in a voice that was intended to sound injured.

"What's the gridiron for? A gentle reminder of the Cannibal Isles? We don't really know yet that they're missionaries!" said Billy.

"Sorry you don't know a Gates Ajar when you see it," said Tom, grinning.

"I do," said Billy decidedly. "That isn't one. Here are your roses, Winnie. You look like somebody's step-mother in all that train and gla.s.ses. Where did you get them?"

"Winona!" called Louise, tearing downstairs, "I've just remembered that Clay has been calling the fritters 'crullers' ever since we made them.

He'll send them in with the ice-cream if he isn't told not to."

She fled to the kitchen.

"Step-mother.... M'm," said Tom with a light of mischief in his eye; and followed Louise.

"_Look_ at the table!" Winona implored Billy.

Billy looked, took in the whole effect, and, as Winona had done, sat down to laugh in comfort.

"It's not so bad, after all," he said comfortingly when he was through.