CHAPTER XV

AT THE RUMMAGE

The rooms were ready at last, and twenty tired ladies went through them to see that every thing was in its proper place, and then went home with high anticipations of the morrow and what it would bring.  It opened most propitiously and was one of those soft, balmy September days, more like early June than autumn.  There were brisk sales and crowds of people all day, with the probability of greater crowds and brisker sales in the evening.  Jack Harcourt was in and out, watching the sale of what his sister had sent, drinking cups of chocolate every time a pretty girl asked him to do so, and buying toys and picture books and candy, and distributing them among the children gathered around the door and windows.  He thought he had looked at everything on sale, but had failed to find the white apron.  Where was it? he wondered.  He would not ask Ruby Ann or Mrs. Biggs, as that would be giving himself away.  It would certainly be there in the evening when he was to bring Eloise in her chair.  He had settled that with Tim, who gave up rather unwillingly, but was consoled by being hired as errand boy,—­an office he could not have filled had he been hampered with a wheel chair.

The night was glorious, with a moon near its full, and a little before seven Jack presented himself at Mrs. Biggs’s, finding Eloise ready and alone.  Tim was at the rooms, running hither and thither at everybody’s beck and call, and his mother was there, running the whole thing,—­judging from her manner as she moved among the crowd filling the rooms nearly to suffocation.  Eloise had more than once changed her mind about going, as she sat waiting for Jack.  She was shy with strangers, and there would be so many there, and she would be so conspicuous in her chair, with Mr. Harcourt in attendance, that she began to doubt the propriety of going.

“If it were Tim who was to take me, I believe I should feel differently,” she was thinking, when Jack came in, breezy and excited,—­full of the Rummage and anxious to be off.

“You are ready, I see,” he said.  “That’s right.  We have no time to lose.  And there’s no end of fun.  I’ve been there half the day, and drank chocolate, and eaten cake and candy till I never want to see any more.  But you will.”

He was adjusting her dress and getting the chair in motion as he talked, and Eloise had no time to suggest that she ought not to go, before she found herself out upon the piazza, and Jack, who had locked the door, was putting the key under the mat.

“You see I remember where I found it that time Howard and I desiccated the Sabbath by calling upon you,” he said, with a laugh in which Eloise joined.

“Is Mr. Howard going?” she asked, and Jack replied, “He is a kind of lazy fellow, but he’ll be there all right;” and the first one they saw distinctly as they drew near the house was Howard, struggling with the crowd.