With the prospect of supper, and a hot supper, so close at hand, the girls could laugh at the gloomy stories of the old driver.

“We’ll help,” cried Laura.  “Come on, girls, let’s see if we can find enough dishes to set the table.”

So they went gayly to work, setting the table and peeling potatoes, which Mrs. Gilligan proceeded to fry, and enjoyed themselves immensely.

“Shall we eat in the kitchen?” asked Violet, pausing with a pile of plates in her hand.  “Or shall we be very proper and eat in the dining-room?”

“Oh, the kitchen’s a lot more cheerful,” said Billie, shivering a little in spite of herself as she thought of the dark, rather dreary room just the other side of the door.

“Besides, what we want we want in a hurry,” said Laura, taking the dishes from Violet and setting them decidedly on the table.  “To-morrow will be time enough to put on airs.  Just now all I want to do is to eat!”

While they were waiting for the supper to cook and after they had done as much as they could toward its preparation, the girls looked about the kitchen and the gloomy dining room a bit.  The latter room was dark and cheerless, and they wondered that any one should have selected it for a dining room.  The woodwork was all of black walnut, and there was much of it, the window frames and door frames being heavy and ornate and the room being wainscoted with the same dark wood.  The room was large, too, and there were windows at one end only, and that toward the north.

“Oh, come! let us get out of here,” finally cried Laura, grabbing each of the other girls by an arm and running with them out into the more cheerful kitchen.

“Oh, that steak!” cried Billie longingly, as she drifted over to the stove.  “Isn’t it nearly done, Mrs. Gilligan?  This is cruelty to animals.”

Mrs. Gilligan chuckled and turned the steak on the other side.

“Almost ready now,” she said, adding another piece of butter to the golden browned potatoes.  “Have you girls cut the cake?  It’s in one of the packages I brought in—­on the end of the table.  Don’t cut it all now,” she warned, as there was a joyful rush for the cake.  “We want some of it left for to-morrow.”

The girls did not cut it all—­quite.  But they did cut a good two-thirds of it—­and ate it all, too!

It was a strange sort of meal—­the candle-lit kitchen, the hastily set table, the faces of the girls and Mrs. Gilligan brought out in bold relief by the flickering candle light.

The meal was delicious, and the girls ate ravenously, but from time to time one of them would shift uneasily in her seat and look nervously over her shoulder into the dark corners of the room.

Instead of the dinner making them more courageous, it seemed to be having the opposite effect, for when they had finished their cake and the steaming hot coffee, they found themselves talking in whispers as if they were afraid of the sound of their own voices.