Mrs. St. Claire offered him money for the errands he sometimes did for
them, she steadily refused to let him take it. Had she known of Mrs.
Tracy's proposition that he should be present at the party as hall-boy,
she would have declined, for though she could go there herself as an
employee, she shrank from suffering Harold to do so. That Mrs. Tracy was
not a lady, she knew, and in her heart there was always a feeling of
superiority to the woman even while she served her, and she was not as
sorry, perhaps, as she ought to have been, for the attack of rheumatism
which would prevent her from going to the park to take charge of the
kitchen during the evening.

'I am sorry to disappoint her, but I am glad not to be there,' she was
thinking to herself as she sat in her bright, cheerful kitchen, waiting
for Harold, when he burst in upon her, exclaiming:

'Oh, grandma, only think! I am invited to the party, and I told her I'd
go, and I am to be there at half-past seven sharp, and to wear my
meetin' clothes.'

'Invited to the party! What do you mean? Only grown up people are to be
there,' Mrs. Crawford said.

'Yes, I know;' replied Harold, 'but I'm not to be with the _grown-ups_.
I'm to stay in the upper hall and tell 'em where to go.'

'Oh, you are to be a _waiter_,' was Mrs. Crawford's rather contemptuous
remark, which Harold did not heed in his excitement.

'Yes, I'm to be at the head of the stairs, and somebody else at the
bottom; and they are to have fiddlin and dancin'; I've never seen