At a very critical stage of affairs in the pastry-making, Nettie
Blynn knocked at the side door. She only wanted to see Maggie just a
minute about the Christmas entertainment. Maggie set down a
half-beaten dish of eggs and ran. The minute lengthened into many
more, and the girls talked and talked, as girls will, forgetting all
about time. When Margaret returned to the kitchen she found her
mother in a perfect fever of haste, and poor Florence trying to go
two or three ways at once.

"Now, Margaret," her mother began, "I might just as well depend upon
the wind as you! drop everything and run the minute you are called.
That is just as much sense as Nettie Blynn has, running to the
neighbours Saturday morning, and staying like that, when I have so
much to do. You don't seem to care whether you help me or not."

"Why, mother, how could I help it?" Margaret answered with spirit. "I
didn't ask her to come, and I couldn't tell her to go away. Saturday
morning is as good as any other time to her; she doesn't have to work
all day Saturday, and how should she know that I do?"

Just here the front door-bell gave a malicious ting-a-ling. Mrs.
Allan, an old friend who lived several miles out of town, had just a
few minutes before train time; she was sure there was no one in the
world she wanted to see so much as Mrs. Murray, and Mrs. Murray was
just as sure that she herself wanted to see nobody just then, but
there was no help for it. She washed the dough from her hands, and
saying to Margaret, as she hurriedly left the kitchen:

"Finish that pie, and watch the fire; don't let that cake burn, nor
the cranberries."