An eventful day for Peggy came after two weeks of school. In it began a curious series of happenings that added flavor to her whole school life, and gave her, finally, the power to be, as her room-mate laughingly said, “sort of magic.”

And all this came about through so prosaic a thing as bacon. The domestic science class, well under way with an excellent teacher, decided to have a “bacon bat,” after the custom of the Smith College girls, all by themselves on some bit of rock that jutted into the river.

Peggy had helped Katherine do the shopping for the treat,—Katherine had been at Andrews for two years now, and knew just how it was done. Then the seven girls of the class started off, each with a paper bag in her hand, for the method of conveying the supplies to the picnic grounds was always very informal for a bacon bat. There were no little woven picnic baskets to hang picturesquely over their arms, there were no daintily packed little shoe-boxes of sandwiches. There was just the jar of bacon strips in a paper bag, the bottle of olives in another paper bag, and the two dozen rolls, a generous supply, in the biggest paper bag of all. These were the simple requisites for a bacon bat, and even the olives were not necessary, Katherine termed them useless frills. There was a tiny box of matches, too, that Peggy slipped into the pocket of her red jacket. It has happened that a merry group of girls has gone on a bacon bat with everything but the matches, and then unless they were Camp Fire girls and knew how to coax fire out of two dry sticks they met a terrible disappointment, when, their appetites all worked up for the occasion, they found they couldn’t cook the party after all.

If you were on good terms with the grocer, he kept a box of matches—the old fashioned kind—under the counter and offered you a dozen or so, loose, when you bought your bacon. But Peggy had wanted to buy a little box, insisting that if she had to start the fire a dozen might not be enough.

“Where are we going to have it?” Peggy thought to ask as they strolled, laughing, along the road away from the school.

“On the River Bank near Gloomy House,” cried three girls at once, “that’s the ideal spot.”

“Near—what?” asked Peggy in concern. It didn’t sound very picnicky to her.

“Right there, ahead,” said Katherine, pointing, “right through those grounds, and down to the water—because, of course, we can hardly have our fire except on some sort of little stone island—with water enough to put it out if it got rambunctious.”

The girls were turning now over the long, dank grass, and making their way in the direction of a great empty-looking ramshackle old house with sagging porches and dull windows.

“Nobody lives there, do they?” Peggy asked.

“Oh,—sh—yes!”

The girls tiptoed over the grass, skirting the lawn in order to keep as far away from Gloomy House as possible. Peggy was not yet familiar with the traditions of the town in which Andrews was situated. It seemed strange to her that after the girls had chosen this place with such unanimous enthusiasm they should assume such an air of discomfort and mystery now that they had come. She studied the old house, dignified even in its decay, with its trailing, rasping vines blowing against the pillars of the porch, and its sunken, uneven steps, and then quite unaccountably she shivered and hurried past it as fast as the other girls.

“I don’t want to come here for a picnic,” she panted, “if it’s all so queer. Why didn’t we choose some nice sunny place with a little stream to drink out of, and one big tree for shade? It’s so dark and overgrown, as we get through here, that it seems more like an exploring expedition than a regular picnic to me.”

“Oh,” cried Florence Thomas, the best cook in the domestic science class, “we can fry bacon down on those rocks in the river, and there is a grape-vine swing on the bank that goes sailing way out over the water with you. Why, there just isn’t any other place so nice for a picnic—here you always feel as if you might have adventures.”

“Adventures, at a picnic, usually mean cows or snakes,” sighed Peggy, “I hope we don’t have any.”

The girls clambered down the steep slope to the water, and Florence and Dorothy Trowbridge began at once to gather twigs and branches.

“How are we going to cook this bacon?” asked Peggy suddenly, “when we get our fire? Nobody brought a frying pan.”

“Frying pan!” echoed Florence over an armful of nice dry chips and twigs. “We get sticks.”

Peggy saw that each girl was breaking a branch from a near-by tree, testing it to see that it was not “too floppy,” as Katherine put it, and would be green enough not to catch fire easily. Peggy found a delightful little branch, and began stripping the end, as she saw the others do. The fire was by this time crackling and it was a temptation to begin right away, for the walk had made them hungry—or, perhaps, they hadn’t needed the walk: healthy girls like healthy boys are always hungry. But Florence reminded them that their bacon would simply be burned to a crisp if they thrust it in the flames now, so they waited a few minutes, reluctantly enough, until the red and blue sparks sputtered down to a steady glow, hotter and hotter at the heart of the fire. Then the girls each pierced a piece of bacon with their pointed stick and held it gloatingly into the red glow. Peggy enthusiastically opened rolls, so that the crisp hot slices might go sizzling into place as soon as they were taken from the fire, and the roll might be clapped together upon them.

“Isn’t this comfy?” asked Florence, munching her first fiery sandwich. “If the rain and wind had never come, I suppose you could find the ashes, on this flat rock, left by every class that ever went to Andrews. Ouch!—Mercy!—Peggy, what did you let me bite that for, when the end was still burning?”

Peggy laughingly dipped up a cupful of water from the river and passed it to poor Florence, who was trying to wink back the tears from her eyes.

“If you drink that now you’ll smoke,” she warned delightedly. “Girls, girls,—fire!”

“I—don’t—care—” gulped Florence, waving the rest of her roll and bacon through the air to cool it. “Hot as that was, I guess old Mr. Huntington of Gloomy House, up there, would be glad to have it. If he can smell the smoke of this little feast—with that lovely amber coffee Dorothy is making—I guess he wishes he was a girl and could come down and get some. Just think,” she turned to Peggy, “in twenty years he’s never had any hot coffee—or more than enough to keep a bird alive.”

Peggy sat down on a stone and poised an olive half-way to her mouth.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“He’s very poor, you know,” said Florence.

“Too poor to buy coffee?—I should think somebody in the town—”

“Oh, my dear,” interrupted one of the other girls, “scared to death! Nobody’d think of offering to do anything for him. He’s the proudest man in the world. He used to own most of this town, but everything has drifted away from him. He never goes anywhere—nobody ever sees him. He wouldn’t want to see anyone. He telephones to the grocery for just a few things once in a while, and that’s how he gets along. Why, Peggy, you look so funny.”

“While we’re sitting here, having a party, do you mean to tell me the man that lives in Gloomy House is starving?” asked Peggy in a hushed voice.

“Well, sort of hungry, but don’t you worry about it, we can’t do anything about it, Peggy.” Florence handed Peggy a fresh roll with a crisp slice of bacon temptingly projecting from the ends. “He couldn’t have been starving for twenty years, you know—but it would be nearer that than I’d like to experience for myself.”

Peggy’s head drooped thoughtfully. The sunlight, glinting down here and there through the dense green of the trees, shone in a little patch of light on her brown-gold hair. She was a vivid little person, with laughing black eyes and cheeks that flared red through their tan. Her brown arms were clasped over her knees now, as she studied the moist, pebbly sand at her feet.

“I’d have made him some coffee,” she said at last, her crooked dimple flickering into view for just an instant.

“No, you wouldn’t,” denied Florence Thomas, “nobody has been in that house to do anything as daring as that for years. There’s a mystery about it, I tell you—and, in spite of story books, nobody likes to probe too deeply into mysteries. Some people even say that a relative of Mr. Huntington’s stole all his money from him and that’s why he has to live so poorly. Yes, there are lots of stories—”

Peggy brushed the crumbs out of her lap serenely.

“How silly,” she said, “as if anybody’s stealing from the poor old man were reason enough why all the rest of the townspeople should stay away from him and leave him poor,” she said. “What has that to do with my making him some coffee? Even if he’d been the one who stole—still I don’t see the application to this particular question,” she concluded.

“Well, there are other tales,” insisted the crestfallen Florence, and, their coffee cups in their hands, the girls gathered around to tell Peggy many harrowing incidents connected with the great house back from the river, and she heard them quietly, piercing slices of bacon with her stick the while.

“Let’s go up and cook him a dinner,” she cried, springing to her feet when they had done. “We are a cooking class, aren’t we, and that’s the best thing we do, isn’t it? And here we go on just preparing all the good things back at school for us to eat ourselves—it seems, well, piggish. Wouldn’t it be lovely to demonstrate our next lesson by bringing all the materials up to Gloomy House and cooking up a big, wonderful dinner, and having it with Mr. Huntington? We can’t give him a million dollars or anything like that, but we can make one day a lot brighter—and, besides, I can’t stand it to think of anyone hungry—will you, girls? What do you say?”

She stood before them, lifting her slim hand for the vote, her eyes shining with eagerness to put her plan at once into execution.

The other girls gasped. Peggy, although she had been with them so short a time, had won a large place in their admiration.

“He wouldn’t let us,” reminded Florence, puckering her forehead thoughtfully. “Didn’t I tell you he’d bite anybody, fairly, that dreamed of trying to offer him charity? Peggy, I believe you’re partly right, though, maybe we could do something, but it would never work that way.”

“Well,” said Peggy promptly, sitting down to think it out, “how can it be done?”

For to Peggy life presented no unsolvable problems. She never thought of cluttering her joyous way with impossibilities. Once a plan seemed good to her it was only a question of How, and not of Whether.

“We might invite a lot of people to the school,” timidly suggested one of the young cooks.

“He’d never come,” Florence shook her head.

“Well, then,” cried Peggy, “here we are! Let’s give a series of dinners—at the houses of the trustees, and the different girls in the class, just to show what we can do, and we’ll have the accounts put in the town paper, so he’ll see what we’re doing, and then—” her eyes shone and she could hardly talk fast enough to let the girls see the glory of her new idea, “then we’ll go to his house and ask permission to give him one, and it won’t be charity or anything, and it will be fun for everybody—oh, girls, isn’t that gorgeous?”

“OOoo—oo,” shivered Florence at the thought of really committing herself to such a daring decision. “Ye-es, I think we might do that. But we’d never have the courage to go and invite him.”

“Peggy would,” championed the timid one. “Let’s appoint her a committee of one.”

“Unanimously appointed a committee of one,” shouted the other girls gleefully. “Peggy, how soon will all this be?”

Peggy laughingly flung aside her toasting stick, sprang erect, and tried vainly to smooth back her flying gold-toned hair. “Right—NOW!” she declared triumphantly, “we won’t wait to give it to the trustees first.”

“Good-by, Peggy,” murmured Florence demurely, and the others drew closer together as Peggy actually turned her back on them and went up the slope to Gloomy House.

Surprised at her daring, overwhelmed by the boldness of the thing she had undertaken, they watched Peggy disappear over the top of the river bank.