Wythie was a dear little Puritan maiden, in her grey dress and folded kerchief; Rob a brilliant fantasy in her ante-bellum gown with its hoops and sloping shoulders, and her lovely, rebellious hair ringletted from a tremendous back comb. Prue would not consent to being fantastic, so she looked beautiful in a pale green muslin of the empire style, with her golden hair filetted with gold and a great feather fan waving from her long-gloved hand. But the cream of them all was solemn little Polly. The child was not pretty, but something gathered through her few sad years in the lonely home whence all the other children had departed, her frail health and active imagination, had written itself on her sensitive, pale little face. Now her dilated eyes shone like stars; grey eyes they were, under black lashes, the sort that have a trick of looking black, but whose colour is hard to determine. They had dressed her in a long gown, belonging to some Puritan child in the days when costumes not merely denied, but annihilated childhood. Polly's gown had a stiff long stomacher, its front was cut square, like a court lady's, and the heavy silk stood out around her figure, disdaining a hint of a droop. A round cap surmounted the pale brown hair which had been brushed smoothly back from the blue-veined brow, and yellow lace fell around the childish throat and tiny thin hands. There was something in the child herself, poor as her home had been, that exactly suited her quaint fineness of habiliment, and she stood, a quick breathing little poem, a picture of perfect harmony and of a quality that made every artist-eye that rested upon her flash with the perception of its values. When the door of the dressing-room opened and its occupants came forth it was to encounter in the hall a long line of queer and pretty figures of other Fayre girls who were to compose the chorus, and big lads in the collars and coats of their ancestors, delightful foils to the girls' brilliant colours. First and last Fayre, an old colonial town, possessed a goodly store of relics of the past, and there was no lack of material for costuming the concert. While they were dressing the singers had been hearing carriage after carriage roll up the Silsby driveway, and depart, and when they peeped through a life-saving hole in the curtain, but for which they would have perished of curiosity, they saw the ample accommodations which Mrs. Silsby had provided for an audience already filled, and people beginning to station themselves standing at the sides of the long rooms, in the best positions now obtainable.