Lucy stood demurely at the door and watched the carriage out of sight and hearing. Then she started and ran like a hare down the garden, and through the gate in the holly hedge, to the water-side, but presently came running back to beg for some bits of bread to feed the swan. "Bless the poor child!" said kind old Margery. "'Tis like a kitten let out of a basket, to be sure. But, Lady Lucy, my dear, had you not better do your tasks before you go to play?" "I cannot do them all before my aunt comes home again,—no, not if I were to work all night, Margery!" said Lucy, shaking her head. "And if I have the least bit undone I shall be scolded and beaten as much as if I had not touched them: so where is the use? I may just as well play while I can." "'Tis true what the child says," remarked Anne, the housemaid, as Margery looked grave: "my mistress has left her marking and open-hem enough for a grown woman, besides all her other tasks,—more shame to her, I say, to have no feeling for her own flesh and blood! Never mind, Lady Lucy: I will take hold of it when my work is done, and you shall have one good play. But you must mind and wear your gloves and your hood, and not break your nails and scratch your hands with the brambles, or my mistress will find you out." "I don't feel right about teaching and helping the child to deceive her aunt," said Margery, when Lucy had rather unwillingly gone to seek her hood. "I don't care one pin," replied Anne, decidedly. "If my mistress treated any of us with any confidence, or put any trust in one, it would be different; but so long as she and Hannah are always spying and prying about, and won't believe a word one says, even though it should be gospel truth, why, they may just find out what they can, for all me. I shall just sit down and do up the child's open-hem for her, and my mistress may find out the difference if she can. It will not be the first trick I have played her in my time,—nor you either, Mistress Margery." Margery sighed, and shook her head. She was not satisfied with Anne's reasoning, nor did her own conscience acquit her in the matter, but she was very fond of Lucy, and loved to see the child happy for once, as she said. So she set about making currant buns and a gooseberry fool—an old-fashioned country dish, than which there are few better—for Lucy's supper. But Lucy was not destined to the enjoyment of these dainties. She played in the garden and down by the brook as long as she could see, forgetting for a while books, lute, and all the rest of her torments. She talked to Polly Burgess across the stream, and watched her as she milked her own little black Welsh cow, wishing all the time that she had a cow to milk and take care of. At last she yielded to Anne's entreaties that she would come in out of the dew and eat her supper.