"You shall carry the heavy things, dear, and stand to me for your back hair. I think I could make a really good effect with your back hair." Peggy put her head on one side and stared at the flaxen mane in speculative fashion. "A long muslin gown--a wreath of flowers--a bunch of lilies in your hands! If you weren't so fat, you would do splendiforously for Ophelia. I might manage it perhaps if I took you from the back, with your head turned over your shoulder, so as to show only the profile. Like that! Don't move now, but let me see how you look." She took Mellicent's head between her hands as she spoke, wagged it to and fro, as if it belonged to a marionette, and then gave a frog-like leap to a further corner of the bed to study the effect. "A little more to the right. Chin higher! Look at the ceiling. Yes--es--I can do it. I see how it can be done." It turned out, indeed, that Peggy had a genius for designing and posing pretty, graceful pictures. With a few yards of muslin and a basket or such odds and ends of rubbish as horrified Esther's tidy soul to behold, she achieved marvels in the way of fancy costumes, and transformed the placid Mellicent into a dozen different characters: Ophelia, crowned with flowers; Marguerite, pulling the petals of a daisy; Hebe, bearing a basket of fruit on her head, and many other fanciful impersonations were improvised and taken before the week was over. She went about the work in her usual eager, engrossed, happy-go-lucky fashion, sticking pins by the dozen into Mellicent's flesh in the ardour of arrangement, and often making a really charming picture, only to spoil it at the last moment by a careless movement, which altered the position of the camera, and so omitted such important details as the head of the sitter, or left her squeezed into one corner of the picture, like a sparrow on the house-top. Out of a dozen photographs, three, however, were really remarkable successes; as pretty pictures as one could wish to see, and moreover exceedingly good likenesses of the bonnie little subject. Esther's part of the work was performed with her usual conscientious care; and when the last prints were mounted, the partners gazed at them with rapture and pride. They were exhibited at the dinner-table the same evening amid a scene of riotous excitement. The Vicar glowed with pleasure; Mrs. Asplin called out, "Oh, my baby! Bless her heart!" and whisked away two tears of motherly pride. Oswald was silent and subdued; and even Robert said, "Humph--it's not so bad," a concession which turned the girls' heads by its wonderful magnanimity. Their triumph was almost sweeter than they had expected; but, truth to tell, they had had too much of photography during the last week, and Mrs. Asplin's prophecy came true, inasmuch as it now ceased to become an occupation of absorbing interest, and assumed its rightful place as an amusement to be enjoyed now and then, as opportunity afforded.