‘Agnes! you spiteful little thing!’ cried the mother, getting redder and redder. Agnes was sixteen, and the eldest of five, so that to add anything to her age was very undesirable. Cara was too much bewildered to ask what it was which made her a ‘spiteful little thing,’ for just then they came to the final plateau, where the path reached the level of the lawn. And there, snipping away at her roses, was Miss Beresford herself, in a deep sun-bonnet and garden gloves, with a large pair of scissors in her hand, and two baskets at her feet. The roses were in the full flush of their second bloom, notwithstanding their mistress’s fears. She was snipping off the withered flowers, the defective buds, and yellow leaves on one hand, and here and there making a savage dash at a sound twig infested by a colony of green flies, while she cut roses for the decoration of the room. One of the baskets was filled with these flowers, and Miss Cherry, who had preceded them, had lifted this basket from the path, and was looking at it with a perplexed face. ‘There’s a “Malmaison” which is perfect,’ said Miss Charity; ‘and as for those “Giant of Battles”----’ She liked to pronounce their names in her own way, scorning pretence, as she said; and she put down her nose into the basket with true satisfaction. The one thing in the world Miss Charity was a little ‘off her head’ about was a fine rose. ‘They are fine flowers,’ said Miss Cherry, very seriously, her soft voice relaxing, with no smile; ‘but the stalks are so short! How am I to arrange them? unless you put them bolt upright, each one by itself, as they are in a rose show?’ ‘You don’t think I’m going to sacrifice my buds,’ said Miss Charity; ‘never! I see you do it, and that dolt of a gardener, and it goes to my heart. Put them bolt upright; what could be better? or they do very well in flat dishes. You can’t go wrong with roses; but sacrifice my buds--not for the world!’ ‘There is not one long enough to put in one’s belt,’ said Miss Cherry, who looked half disposed to cry. ‘We have more roses than any one, but they never look nice, for they never have any stalks. I must think what is to be done. The flat dishes are not effective, and the pyramids are wearisome, and specimen glasses make the table like a child’s garden.’ ‘There’s a dinner party to-night,’ said Miss Beresford; ‘that’s why Cherry is put out. Come to the arbour and sit down, you poor hot people. How very hot you look, to be sure. That is what it is to be stout. Neither Cherry nor I are stout, and it is a great advantage to us, especially in summer. Come, Maria, you shall have some tea.’ ‘I don’t consider myself stout,’ said Mrs. Burchell, offended. ‘The mother of a large family naturally develops a little. “It would not do, my dear, if you were as slim as you were at twenty,” my husband says to me; “only old maids are thin:” and if _he_ likes it----’