"Maybe they gets sooty," suggested Estelle wisely. "My, wouldn’t it be grand, though, if they’d get washed up, and be flying ’round all red and yaller and ev’ry color." [Illustration: "LUNCHEON WAS SERVED SHORTLY AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL."] Luncheon was served shortly after their arrival. "I don’t know why it is," Peggy confessed. "But it always seems as if you couldn’t get fairly started on a picnic, till you’d had something to eat. I feel that way myself and I guess these children are just the same only more so." Accordingly they sat in a ring in the fresh young grass, and disposed of such quantities of sandwiches and doughnuts that the scientific estimate of the capacity of the human stomach was then and there proved incorrect, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Peggy expected that the gorged Dunns would find a period of inactivity necessary, but instead of stretching in somnolent attitudes under the trees when the moment arrived that they could hold no more, they scattered in all directions. As it seemed quite impossible that they should get into mischief or danger the girls left them to their own devices, and sat talking happily while the breeze brought the coolness of the little lake, and the fragrance of the apple orchards, mingled with more delicate scents, the perfume of the moist earth, the breath of tiny flowers fading unseen, perhaps, but making earth the sweeter for their blooming. "I found some grand ones." Peggy looked up smilingly into Estelle’s radiant face. Then she got to her feet rapidly, for the child’s hands were filled with early garden flowers, with several clusters of geraniums showing up dazzlingly among the more modest blossoms. "Where did you get them?" Peggy gasped. "Over back of that house." Estelle gestured with her treasures in the direction of a snug-looking farmhouse standing on a rise of land above the lake. "Don’t pick any more there, dear. I guess those flowers belong to the people who live in the house. But all the flowers in the woods, and growing around the meadows, belong to everybody." She made a grimace at the other girls, over the head of the unconscious Estelle. "I’ve got to go up to the farmhouse and explain matters." "I’ll go with you," said Elaine, jumping to her feet, and the two started up the long slope, Peggy sighing penitently. "It was all my fault. I was so anxious those children shouldn’t think they were going to be arrested if they picked a dandelion, I guess I went a little too far the other way. Who would have thought that they would have stumbled on a garden first thing?" The farmer’s wife, being indoors, had not noticed the rifling of her garden, but so far from displaying annoyance over Peggy’s explanations, she was manifestly interested. "I’ve heard tell," she replied, "that some of those city children set store by flowers to beat all. And she picked her hands full, did she? Didn’t know the difference between wildflowers and garden stuff? Well, well!"