picnics were planned and carried out, and long delightful afternoons were spent over books and fancy-work on the Harrington veranda.
Pollyanna was delighted. Not only were her paying guests being kept from any possibilities of ennui and homesickness, but her good friends, the Carews, were becoming delightfully acquainted with her other good friends, the Pendletons. So, like a mother hen with a brood of chickens, she hovered over the veranda meetings, and did everything in her power to keep the group together and happy.
Neither the Carews nor the Pendletons, however, were at all satisfied to have Pollyanna merely an onlooker in their pastimes, and very strenuously they urged her to join them. They would not take no for an answer, indeed, and Pollyanna very frequently found the way opened for her.
"Just as if we were going to have you poked up in this hot kitchen frosting cake!" Jamie scolded one day, after he had penetrated the fastnesses of her domain. "It is a perfectly glorious morning, and we're all going over to the Gorge and take our luncheon. And you are going with us."
"But, Jamie, I can't—indeed I can't," refused Pollyanna.
"Why not? You won't have dinner to get for us, for we sha'n't be here to eat it."
"But there's the—the luncheon."
"Wrong again. We'll have the luncheon with us, so you can't stay home to get that. Now what's to hinder your going along with the luncheon, eh?"
