"I saw a man do that at a bazar once," said Della. "It was wonderful. He ill.u.s.trated Cinderella. He cut out a coach and tiny horses and the old fairy without drawing anything at all beforehand."
"Nothing doing here," Tom pushed away an imaginary offer of scissors and black paper.
"Here"s where my grand idea comes in," insisted Ethel Brown. "My idea is to cut out of the magazines any figures that please you."
"Figures with action would be fun," suggested Roger.
"They"d be prettiest, too. You"ll find them in the advertising pages as well as in the stories. Paste them on to your box or whatever you want to decorate, and then go over them with black oil paint."
"Good for old Ethel Brown!" applauded her brother. "I didn"t think you had it in you, child! Have you ever tried it?"
"Yes, sir, I have. I knew I"d probably meet with objections from an unimaginative person like you, so I decorated this cover and brought it along as a sample."
It proved to be an idea as dashing as it was simple. Ethel Brown had selected a girl rolling a hoop. A dog, cut from another page, was bounding beside her. Some delicate foliage at one side hinted at a landscape.
"Wasn"t it hard not to let the black run over the edges of the picture?"
asked Della.
"Yes, you have to keep your wits about you all the time. But then you have to do that any way if you want what you"re making to amount to anything, so that doesn"t count."
"That"s a capital addition, that suggestion of ground that you made with a whisk or two of the brush."
"Just a few lines seem to give the child something to stand on."
"These plans for decoration look especially good to me," said practical James, "because there"s nothing to stick up on them. They"ll pack easily and that"s what we must have for our purpose."
"That"s true," agreed Helen. "For doing up presents that don"t have to travel it"s pretty to cut petals of red poinsettia and twist them with wire and make a flower that you can tuck in under the string that you tie the parcel with--"
"Or a bit of holly. Holly is easily made out of green crepe paper or tissue paper," cried Della.
"But as James says, none of the boxes for the orphans can have stick-ups or they"ll look like mashed potatoes when they reach the other side."
"We"ll stow away the poinsettia idea for home presents then," said Margaret. "What we want from James, however, is a lot of boxes of any and every size that he can squeeze out."
"No sc.r.a.ps thrown away, old man," decreed Tom, "for even a cube of an inch each way will hold a few sweeties."
"Orders received and committed to memory," acknowledged the invalid, saluting.
"By the way, I learned an awfully interesting thing to-day," said Helen.
"Name it," commanded Roger, busy with knife and pastepot making one of the twine and tag boxes that he had described.
"I"ll tell you while we each make one of the things we"ve been talking about so that we can leave them for patterns with James."
Dorothy had already set about applying her wistaria vine to the cover of a box whose body Tom was putting together. Ethel Blue was making a string box from a mailing tube, covering it with a sc.r.a.p of chintz with a very small design; Ethel Brown was hunting in an old magazine for figures suitable for making silhouettes; James was writing in a notebook the various hints that had been bestowed upon him so generously that he feared his memory would not hold them all without help; Helen and Della were measuring and cutting some cotton cloth that was to be used in the gifts that Della was eager to tell about.
"By the time Helen has told her tale I"ll be ready to explain my gift idea," she said.
"Go on, then, Helen," urged James, "I"m ready to "start something"
myself, in a minute."
"You and Margaret have heard us talk about our German teacher?"
"We"ve seen her," said Margaret. "She was at our entertainment."
"So she was. I remember, she and her mother sat right behind the old ladies from the Home."
"And they knitted for the soldiers whenever the lights were up."
"I guess Mrs. Hindenburg knitted when the lights were off, too," said Helen. "I"ve seen her knitting with her eyes shut."
"She sent in some more wristers for the orphans the other day," said Dorothy. "She has made seven pairs so far, and three scarfs and two little sweaters."
"Some knitter," announced Roger.
"Fraulein knits all the time, too, but she says she can"t keep up with her mother. This is what I wanted to tell you--you remember when Roger first went there she told him that Fraulein"s betrothed was in the German army. Well, yesterday she told us who he is."
"Is it all right for you to tell us?" warned Roger.
"It"s no secret. She said that the engagement was to have been announced as soon as he got back from Germany and that many people knew it already."
"Is he an American German?"
"It"s our own Mr. Schuler."
Roger gave a whistle of surprise; the Ethels cried out in wonder, and the Hanc.o.c.ks and the Watkinses who did not know many Rosemont people, waited for the explanation.
"Mr. Schuler was the singing teacher in the high school year before last and last year," explained Helen. "Last spring he had to go back to Germany in May so he was there when the army was mobilized and went right to the front."
"It does come near home when you actually know a soldier fighting in the German army and a nurse in a hospital on the Allies" side," said Roger thoughtfully.
"It makes it a lot more exciting to know who Fraulein"s betrothed is."
"Does she speak of him?" asked Margaret.
"She talked about him very freely yesterday after her mother mentioned his name."
"I suppose she didn"t want the high school kids gossiping about him,"
observed Roger.
"As we are," interposed James.
"We aren"t gossiping," defended Helen. "She looks on the Club members as her special friends--she said so. She knows we wouldn"t go round at school making a nine days" wonder of it. She knows we"re fond of her."
"We are," agreed Roger. "She"s a corker. I wonder we didn"t think of its being Mr. Schuler."
"Her mother always mentioned him as "my daughter"s betrothed"; and Fraulein yesterday kept saying "my betrothed." We might have gone on in ignorance for a long time if Mrs. Hindenburg hadn"t let it slip out yesterday."
"Well, I hope he"ll come through with all his legs and arms uninjured,"