Elizabeth Ann learned more about Catherine Gould as the school term advanced. Catherine lived nearer to the Bonnie Susie than any other girl, and she was apt to come over Saturdays, to play with Elizabeth Ann and Doris. They went to her house, too, and as Mattie had said, Catherine did live in a large house and there wasn’t much that her mother wouldn’t let her do.

“I wish my mother would be like Mrs. Gould,” said Doris, one night at the supper table. “Mrs. Gould only says, ‘Well, all right,’ when Catherine tells her she doesn’t want to do her homework.”

Uncle Hiram shook his head.

“That is exactly why Catherine doesn’t get along better in school,” said he. “She only does what she wants to do. Most of the time she doesn’t want to study her homework. So last June she wasn’t promoted with the rest of her class.”

“Catherine always talks about her piano lessons,” declared Elizabeth Ann. “But she doesn’t like to practice. And her mother has to do all the explaining when the teacher comes, and Catherine doesn’t know her music lesson.”

“Well, anyway, she has a good time,” Doris said enviously.

Doris was getting to look more like the old Doris that Elizabeth Ann remembered at Aunt Ida’s school. Her cheeks were a little pinker each day, she ate more mashed potato for supper, and she hardly ever grumbled over her breakfast oatmeal any more. To be sure, she didn’t like walking to the bus—and very often when Mr. Gould stopped at the Bonnie Susie, with Catherine seated beside him in his car, Doris thought that Uncle Hiram was “mean,” because he insisted that Elizabeth Ann and Doris should walk to the bus.

“Orders are orders,” Uncle Hiram was fond of saying, “and your Uncle Doctor said plainly that you two children are to walk every day it’s possible. You don’t want to forget how to use your feet, do you, Doris?”

And then Aunt Grace would say, apparently as though she had just thought of it, “Of course, if you don’t feel strong enough to walk, Doris, your uncle might be willing for you to ride; but if you don’t feel well you’ll have to go to bed earlier every night and I couldn’t think of letting you go to Catherine’s party.”

That always made Doris declare hastily that she didn’t mind walking at all. Elizabeth Ann, who remembered how Uncle Doctor made his sick people take walks whether they wanted to or not, was glad that Aunt Grace was there to remind Doris about the party. For Doris could be rather stubborn, and she might say she wouldn’t walk to the bus—only she never in the wide world would say that if she knew she couldn’t go to Catherine’s party.

For Catherine was planning a wonderful party—the best and largest, so she said, that she had ever given, and it would be on Hallowe’en, which is, of course one of the best times in the whole of the year for party fun.

“I’m going to have prizes for the nicest costumes and everything,” announced Catherine importantly. “You all have to dress up and wear masks, so no one will know who you are.”

Catherine saw no reason for keeping her party plans a secret and she early announced that she meant to invite her entire class to her house, except Roger Calendar.

“I don’t see any reason why I have to ask him,” said Catherine, “I don’t like him and anyway he won’t have anything fit to wear.”

But Catherine soon found out that she couldn’t invite the entire class and leave one out. Miss Owen said that would be a dreadful thing to do and Catherine’s own daddy, when he heard of the plan, said he would not let such a thing happen.

“If you plan to invite the entire class, you’ll have to invite every one of them,” said Mr. Gould to his daughter, firmly. “I won’t have anyone deliberately slighted; I like Roger Calendar, and the boy gets little enough fun. Ask him to your party.” “He won’t have anything to wear,” objected Catherine.

“He can wear what he pleases to a Hallowe’en party,” Mr. Gould said. “Ask him, anyway.”

Now Catherine’s mother might let her do as she pleased, but her daddy, although he loved her dearly, could not be coaxed or teased. Catherine knew she would have to invite Roger, or else not have any party. Rather than give up the whole plan, she sent him one of the pretty invitations.

“Perhaps he will have sense enough not to come,” she said to Elizabeth Ann.

And at first it looked as though Roger wouldn’t go to the party.

“No, I’m not going,” he said when Elizabeth Ann spoke to him about it. “I don’t believe Catherine wants me to come to her party, and besides I haven’t a costume. Everyone is going to dress up and I’ll look queer. I suppose I could go as a tramp, but I’m tired of looking like a tramp every day.”

Elizabeth Ann thought this over. Doris said she was silly to worry about Roger, and she’d much better spend the time thinking up something for them to wear. Doris depended on Elizabeth Ann to “think” her a costume, as she said.

“I want Roger to have a good time,” explained Elizabeth Ann, “and he can’t have a good time unless he has a costume to wear. I’m going to ask Uncle Hiram what to do about it.”

By this time Elizabeth Ann and Uncle Hiram were excellent friends. He had taught her to tell time by the ship’s clock, and though she couldn’t, as she wrote Uncle Doctor, do it in a hurry, if she went about it slowly she could count the hours by bells very nicely. Uncle Hiram was always telling her that she would make a fine little sailor, and Elizabeth Ann thought that if she hadn’t first planned to be a doctor like Uncle Doctor and Lex, she might have liked to be a sailor.

“Uncle Hiram,” said Elizabeth Ann one afternoon when she came in, red-cheeked and breathless from running down the lane—she had raced Doris home from the bus and had won, as she usually did—“Uncle Hiram, you know that Catherine Gould is going to give a party Hallowe’en. That’s only a week off now. It’s going to be a party with prizes and ’freshments and everything. And all the class is invited.”

“Seems to me,” Uncle Hiram answered, his eyes twinkling, “that I heard something about this party before.”

“I may have told you something about it,” admitted Elizabeth Ann, “but I didn’t tell you about Roger Calendar. Catherine invited him to come and he doesn’t want to go, because he hasn’t any costume.”

“What kind of a costume does he want?” Uncle Hiram asked showing the liveliest interest.

“Oh—I don’t know,” confessed Elizabeth Ann. “Something that isn’t a tramp costume, I guess. He says he looks like a tramp every day, and he won’t go to the party dressed to look like one.”

“Don’t blame him,” Uncle Hiram said. “Don’t blame him a bit. I think I can lend the lad something—suppose you come with me, Elizabeth Ann, and we’ll overhaul a chest or two and see what we can drag up in our net.”

“I love to overhaul,” declared the enthusiastic Elizabeth Ann, who hadn’t the slightest idea what Uncle Hiram meant.