When an hour later the girls called, Ted told them what was strictly true. Nancy was in bed with a sick headache and she couldn't go. Carrying their messages of sympathy upstairs to Nancy, along with a plate full of broken cake and a glass of ice cold lemonade, Ted tried to cheer his disconsolate sister, but even then she had not discovered that the whole trouble was merely her neglect of greasing those cake tins. The cook book didn't direct so simple a thing as that and, of course, poor Nancy just hadn't noticed that her mother did it. She was usually too concerned about the remnants of cake dough being left in the bowl, to observe how the batter was being put in the pans. "Does it ache hard?" asked Ted, sitting beside his sister and referring to her head. "Yes, it does, Ted, but this lemonade is splendid." "I can make good lemonade," Ted admitted. "And your cake is swell, only it sticks awful. I got it out with the pie server," he told Nancy simply. "Yes. I couldn't get it to come off the pan at all. Well," and Nancy moved to get up, "I suppose I won't feel any worse down stairs. What color dress did Ruth have on?" To the best of his limited ability Ted described the girls' costumes and then, determined to drive away Nancy's blues, he started in to recite in detail his great experience of that morning. "Now Nan," he began, "you can say all you like, but Mr. Sanders does disappear. _I saw him!_" "_You_ saw him disappear!" "Yes, sure as shootin'. We were all running down the hill, trying to get to the station before that big shower, when I said to Tom, 'there's Mr. Sanders, comin' up.' He said he saw him too, and we kept on runnin', when I was just goin' to shout hello, and true as I tell you, Nan, there wasn't any Mr. Sanders anywhere in sight!" "Ted Brandon!" "Yep, that's just what I'm telling you. We all saw him go, but no one saw where to." And presently even the lost pleasure and the spoiled cake were soon forgotten in their discussion of Ted's remarkable story. CHAPTER XII THE VIRTUE OF RESOLVE But something had happened to Nancy. The cake failure represented to her much more than a simple episode, for it had suddenly summed up all the awful possibilities of untrained hands. It was well enough to make excuses, to claim business and even artistic talent, for Nancy could draw and color, and was among the best in her class as an art student, but the fact now bore down upon her with undisguised horror! She could not do what other girls could do. She could not even bake a cake. "And just as mother so often told me," she reflected bitterly, "it is not at all a question of preference but of simple, civilized living. What _I_ don't do and should do someone else _must_ do, and that's anything but fair play on my part," Nancy sadly admitted. "Aren't you going to open the store, Nan?" Ted asked her. "There's been someone knocking a long time and now they're going away--"