'Was it there that you and Freddy went to look for Cassiopeia's Chair?' inquires Peggy drily; 'and were more than an hour and a half before you could find her?' 'It is so odd that I had never noticed her before,' cries Prue hastily. 'She is such a queer shape, more like a long straggling W than a chair.' 'And, after all,' continues Margaret slowly, with an uneasy smile, and not paying any heed to her sister's interpolation, 'she turned out to be in the kiosk.' Prue is silent. The little hairy dog has brought her ruined garland back to her feet; and, holding it between his fore-paws, is painstakingly biting off each leaf and tendril, and strewing them over the close-shaven sward. The parrot is going to sleep, standing on one leg, and making a clacking noise with his beak; not a posture that one would have thought _à priori_ conducive to slumber. 'It was not a place in which one would have expected to find a large constellation, was it?' asks Peggy, still with that same rather rueful smile, and stroking her sister's childish head as she speaks--'the darkest corner of a kiosk.' But at that Prue leaps to her feet; and having, in the twinkling of an eye, twitched the hose out of Jacob's hand, she points it at her sister. 'Mention the word kiosk once more,' cries she desperately, and winking away a couple of tears, 'and you will not have a dry stitch upon you.' CHAPTER II 'Ave Maria! 'Tis the hour of prayer! Ave Maria! 'Tis the hour of love!' Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of dinner, too; and towards that dinner, about to be spread at the Big House, the inmates of the little one are hastening on foot through the park. Brougham have they none; goloshes and a lanthorn their only substitute. The apricot sunset and the harvest moon will be their two lanthorns to-night; but upon the goloshes Peggy has, in the case of her sister, sternly insisted. Hastening through the park--alternately hastening, that is to say--and loitering, as Prue's fear of being too late, and Peggy's better-grounded apprehension of being too early, get the upper hand. 'How calm you are!' cries the young girl feverishly, as Margaret stops for a moment to 'Suck the liquid air' of the ripe harvest evening, and admire the velvet-coated stags springing through the bracken. 'How _can_ you be so calm? Were you calm at your first dinner-party?' 'I cannot recollect,' replies Peggy, honestly trying to recall the now five-years-old dead banquet referred to. 'I can only remember that I felt swelled.' 'Do not you think that we might go on now?' asks Prue, anxiously kicking one golosh against the other. 'We cannot be much too soon; our clocks are always slow. It would be awkward, would not it, if we sailed in last of all?'