"Oh, you precious goose! Bridgie can do everything, can't she? She always could in your eyes. It's very silly of you, dear, but it's very nice. I'm not at all vexed with you about it." "You would be, though, if you were her true friend, but you always spoil one another, you two!" cried Esmeralda lightly. Then she stared round the room with a surprised expression, and added disapprovingly, "You seem to have been fairly lazy while I've been out. I thought you would have been getting on with the decorations. Whatever have you been doing?" "Roaming about, and actually daring to enjoy ourselves like other people," retorted Bridgie, with what Mademoiselle was glad to recognise as a decided nip of severity; "but from this minute there must be no more playing until the work is finished. Dennis has cut the evergreens, and we must begin making wreaths at once, so as to be in order when Jack arrives to-morrow evening. We could have two hours' work before dinner." "I loathe making wreaths; they are so dirty and prickly, and I take a pride in me hands; they are the only ones I have, and what's the use of sleeping in white kid gloves, the same as if I were dressed for a party, if they are to be scratched all over with that hateful holly?" Esmeralda stretched out two well-shaped, if somewhat large, hands, and gazed at them with pensive admiration; but Bridgie was firm, and, scratches or no scratches, insisted that she should take her own share of the work. As soon as tea was over, then, the family descended to the servants' hall, a whitewashed apartment about as cheerful as a vault, and but little warmer despite the big peat fire, where they set to work to reduce a stack of evergreens into wreaths and borderings for cotton wool "Merrie Christmases" and "Happy Newe Yeares" reserved from former occasions. Pat and Miles cut the branches into smaller and more workable proportions. Pixie unravelled string and wire, and the three elders worked steadily at their separate wreaths. At the end of an hour they had progressed so well that it was suggested that the three fragments should be tied together, and the wreath hung in the hall, to clear the room for further operations.