"Of course it is, Miss Tender-Fingers! If we let it get comfortably cool we could n’t pull it at all. Keep hold--keep it moving. Don ’t let it stay in your fingers long enough to stick. Pull--swing--pull--swing! Hold on! You’re getting stuck! Wait a minute!" "I can’t do anything but wait!" gasped Shirley, holding up ten fingers hopelessly embedded in a mass of uncomfortably warm material. "What! Can this be the expert stenographer, all balled up in a couple of quarts of molasses? Hold still! Don’t try to work out. I ’ll pull you loose. Don’t let the others see. Keep away from that kitchen door!" But Rufus, pulling smoothly away from Jane, with the art acquired by much practice in past years, spied out the tangled ones. His shout of laughter brought all the others toward the wood-shed door. Shirley and Peter were obliged to return to the kitchen to obtain butter for the stuck-up fingers. They fell into a state of great merriment over the situation, in which everybody else joined appreciatively, and the old kitchen rafters rang with the laughter. "Where would the stage apron be now? This is no gallery play!" jeered Peter, rescuing one long string of brownish-yellow sweetness from the front of Shirley’s big white apron. "Want a taste? Shut your eyes and open your mouth!" "No, thank you. Eat it yourself." "I will," and Peter tipped back his head. At this interesting moment the door between dining-room and kitchen swung open. A figure appeared upon the threshold--a figure clad in silk and furs, topped by a Parisian bonnet. Over its shoulder showed the heads of two others--one wearing a wonderful hat covered with fine black ostrich-plumes, the other its own thin thatch of short, iron-gray hair. "We have found you at last!" said the voice of Mrs. Harrison Townsend. Behind her, Olive burst into a musical peal of laughter. "Look at Shirley, mother! Don’t you think it’s about time we came home to prevent her quite returning to childhood?" Then Mr. Harrison Townsend, from the background:--"This is rather stealing a march on you, good friends. But we found our own house dark--and this is Christmas eve!" CHAPTER VIII PETER READS RHYMES "Stay? Of course you’ll stay!" declared Grandfather Bell to Mr. and Mrs. Townsend. "It’ll do you good after all your junketing, and we’ll be mightily pleased to have you." It had not taken much persuasion. There certainly was a charm pervading the old farmhouse, and the thought of resting quietly there for a few days appealed to Mrs. Townsend. Her husband was delighted at the plan, for he had been persuaded to join his wife abroad, and several months of European travel had wearied him. Everything simple and homelike attracted him now more than ever. It had been his restlessness which had brought his party home a month before the date originally set for their return.