The one definite property that Prue seems to have brought back from her Harborough visit is a sickly and contemptuous disgust for whatever had formerly given her pleasure; a standard by which to measure all the conditions of her own life, and find them grossly wanting. About the visit itself she is singularly reticent. Not a word does she breathe of her own prowess in donkey tandem-driving; not a hint does she let drop of any midnight gambols. Once and again Margaret sadly fancies that she sees faint signs of the old lifelong habit of telling her everything trying to reassert its sway; but in a moment it is checked. Often Prue seems to her sister like a child who, engaged in some naughtiness, has been charged by its confederates not to tell. And Prue does not tell. Yet, from indications which she cannot help letting fall, Peggy gathers that the visit has not been all pleasure; that fits of bitter disappointment, sharp jealousy, grisly disillusion, freaked the surface of its feverish joy. And yet Freddy had been a co-guest with her through the whole fortnight! This fact Margaret has elicited by direct inquiry; it would never have been volunteered. 'Come, Prue,' she says coaxingly, on the morning after the young girl's return, as they stroll about the garden, whose flowers Prue notices only to disparage, 'I let you off last night because you were so sleepy, but you must tell me something about your visit now. Was Freddy there?' 'Yes.' 'All the time?' 'Yes.' 'Did you see much of him?' A slight hesitation, and then an accent of impatience: 'Of course. Were not we staying in the same house?' 'And--and--did Mr. Harborough mount you? You know, don't you--I told you, I think,' a beam of pleasure shining in her anxious blue eyes--'that milady has lent you the little gray mare for the whole winter?' 'I do not think that I care for riding as much as I did,' replies Prue listlessly, plucking the seed-vessel from an overblown dahlia in the border beside her, and idly scattering the seeds over the walk. 'We did not ride much; there were so many more amusing things to do.' 'What sort of things?' 'Oh, they would not have amused you!' 'How do you know that, until you tell me what they were?' 'Oh, they would not have amused you; you are not easily amused. _He_ always says so; and besides,' sinking down with a sigh on the bench under the Judas-tree, 'of what use to talk of them now they are over?' For a second Peggy shrinks into herself in baffled discouragement, but immediately recovers. She will not be so easily disheartened. 'If they are so amusing,' she says cheerfully, 'perhaps we might adopt some of them here. We are not above learning, are we?' Prue smiles disdainfully, curling her childish nose. 'In these extensive grounds?'