"I sha'n't care if there is," replied Berry. "I must say it sounds to me like a very stupid plan,--no men, and nothing in particular to eat. It's just like Mrs. Gray. Her ideas are so queer, as mamma says." "I wonder you go if you feel that way about it," retorted Julia. "I dare say I sha'n't. I have a strong presentiment that on that particular day I shall have a headache." And Berry did,--a "distracting" headache, as she wrote Georgie over-night. She was the only member of the Early Dip Club who missed the picnic. Headaches are sad but convenient things. Eleven o'clock brought the girls to the Grays' front door, all ready for their start, in various village carts and victorias. There was a little re-distribution: Georgie and Gertrude fitted in with some of their cronies, and Mrs. Gray took three girls besides Marian and Candace in her wagonette. Frederic and the coachman stowed many small baskets and a heap of wraps into the different rumbles and box seats, and they set forth under the bluest of blue skies. It was a beautiful day, just warm enough and not too warm; for a fragrant wind was blowing softly in from the sea. They had passed the first beach, which at that hour was black with bathers and by-standers, and had climbed the hill-slope which separates it from the second beach, when Marian suddenly cried, "Mamma, here we are close to Purgatory; can't we stop just a minute and show it to Candace?" Mrs. Gray looked at her watch. "Your minute will be at least a quarter of an hour, Marian," she said; "but I think there is time enough. Would any of the rest of you like to go?" Girls always "want to go." There was a general disembarkation; and Mrs. Gray led the way through a gate and across a rough field which stretched along the top of a line of cliffs, steeper and bolder than those on the Newport Point, and cut here and there into sudden sharp fissures. The scanty grass, yellow with August sun, was broken everywhere by lumps and boulders of that odd conglomerate which is known by the name of "plum-pudding stone." Golden-rod and the early blue aster were flowering everywhere. A flock of sheep fled at their approach, with a low rushing sound like the wind in boughs. [Illustration: PURGATORY. The name of "Purgatory" seemed to her to suggest some terrible sort of place.--PAGE 188.]