“If we show you the painted chamber will you promise not to be too unhappy?” asked Nancy.  “You can’t help crying with rage and grief that it is our painted chamber, not yours; but try to bear up until you get to the hotel, because mother is so soft-hearted she will be giving it back to you unless I interfere.”

“You must have spent money lavishly when you restored this room,” said the Consul; “it is a real work of art.”

“Not a penny,” said Mrs. Carey.  “It is the work of a great friend of Nancy’s, a seventeen-year-old girl, who, we expect, will make Beulah famous some day.  Now will you go into your mother’s room and find your way downstairs by yourself?  Julia, will you show Mr. Hamilton the barn a little later, while Nancy and I get supper?  Kitty must go to the Pophams’ for Peter; he is spending the afternoon with them.”

Nancy had enough presence of mind to intercept Kitty and hiss into her ear:  “Borrow a loaf of bread from Mrs. Popham, we are short; and see if you can find any way to get strawberries from Bill Harmon’s; it was to have been a bread-and-milk supper on the piazza, to-night, and it must be hurriedly changed into a Consular banquet! Verb. sap. Fly!”

Gilbert turned up a little before six o’clock and was introduced proudly by his mother as a son who had just “gone into business.”

“I’m Bill Harmon’s summer clerk and delivery boy,” he explained.  “It’s great fun, and I get two dollars and a half a week.”

Nancy and her mother worked like Trojans in the kitchen, for they agreed it was no time for economy, even if they had less to eat for a week to come.

“Mr. Hamilton is just as nice as I guessed he was, when his first letter came,” said Nancy.  “I went upstairs to get a card for the supper menu, and he was standing by your mantelpiece with his head bent over his arms.  He had the little bunch of field flowers in his hand, and I know he had been smelling them, and looking at his mother’s picture, and remembering things!”

What a merry supper it was, with a jug of black-eyed Susans in the centre of the table and a written bill of fare for Mr. Hamilton, “because he was a Consul,” so Nancy said.

Gilbert sat at the head of the table, and Mr. Hamilton thought he had never seen anything so beautiful as Mrs. Carey in her lavender challie, sitting behind the tea cups; unless it was Nancy, flushed like a rose, changing the plates and waiting on the table between courses.  He had never exerted himself so much at any diplomatic dinner, and he won the hearts of the entire family before the meal was finished.

“By the way, I have a letter of introduction to you all, but especially to Miss Nancy here, and I have never thought to deliver it,” he said.  “Who do you think sent it,—­all the way from China?”

“My son Tom!” exclaimed Nancy irrepressibly; “but no, he couldn’t, because he doesn’t know us.”

“The Admiral, of course!” cried Gilbert.