Six young people home for the holidays are apt to turn a house upside down, and it was fortunate for Mrs. Fleming that she had an easy-going and happy-go-lucky disposition, and could view with comparative equanimity the chaos that reigned in the schoolroom. To Diana it was delightful; she preferred a floor littered with shavings, a table spread with paints, plasticine modelling-clay, and other descriptions of mess, and chairs encumbered with books and papers, to the neatest, tidiest room where everything you want is put away out of reach in cupboards. "When I heard I was coming to the Vicarage, I thought: 'My, I guess I won't have to bounce there!' But you're a real set of sports," she assured her new friends. "Well, I don't think we're exactly what you'd call prim and proper," chuckled Meg. There were still a few days before Christmas, and the energies of the whole family were focused on decorations. There were not many people in the village with leisure to help, so most of the work fell upon the Flemings. They tramped down to the church, bearing great armfuls of evergreens, strings of holly-berries, and texts cut out in paper letters. The girls sat in a pew and twisted garlands of yew and laurel, which the boys, with the aid of a short ladder, fastened round the pillars. Mrs. Fleming was fitting panels of cotton wool on to the pulpit, and sprinkling them with artificial frost. "We ought to have lots of flags about the place this Christmas," said Monty, "to make it a sort of victory celebration as well. I'll put two or three over the organ, and stick some round the monuments. What I'd like would be to see our huge Union Jack hanging down over that blank wall there." "Well, why don't you put it?" enquired Diana, looking up from her wreath-twisting. "All very well, madam, but how am I going to get it there? That's a little detail which escapes your feminine observation. Please to note the height of our ladder and the height of that wall, and compare the difference." "I'd get up on to that passage and fix it," nodding to the triforium. "Would you, indeed, Miss America? I rather think I see you toddling along there, with a drop of thirty feet below you." "Do you dare me to?" "You're brave enough down here in a pew, but I don't believe any girl would have the head for that. Women aren't steeple-jacks!" "You needn't speak so scornfully. There may be a few steeple-jennies among them!" "No fear," laughed Monty, turning away.