The pretty, bored little face bending over the plain sewing showed mutinous in the sunlit brightness of the quiet room; the small fingers were hot, and the needle was sticky and refused to pass through the coarse material: it bent alarmingly, and, in response to a savage little thrust from a determined steel thimble, snapped audibly in the silence. Miss Agatha looked up with quick rebuke. "Not again, Prudence? That is the second needle this morning." She hunted in her basket for a fresh needle, and passed it down the line to the rebellious worker in displeased silence. Prudence's blue eyes snapped dangerously, but she made no spoken comment. She threaded the new needle languidly, and then sat with it in her idle hands and stared through the open French window to the inviting stretch of green lawn, dotted with brilliant flower beds, which made tennis, or any other game, thereon impossible, which was the reason, Bobby was wont to assert, why his aunt insisted on their remaining. Bobby and Prudence would have made a clean sweep of the bedding-out borders if they had been allowed their will. Miss Agatha, looking up and observing this idleness, was on the point of remonstrating when the door opened opportunely to admit a visitor, and Prudence's delinquencies were forgotten in the business of welcoming the arrival. "My dear Mrs North!" Miss Agatha exclaimed, surprised, and rose hastily and shook hands with the vicar's wife, who, warm and a little flushed, greeted her effusively, and nodded affably to the train of nondescript sisters, who all rose and remained standing until the new-comer was seated, when they reseated themselves--all save Prudence; she edged a little nearer to the open window, prepared for escape at the first favourable moment. "Such an astonishing thing has happened," Mrs North was saying breathlessly to the monotonous accompaniment of the diligently-plied needles. "That girl, Bessie Clapp, has come back. I saw her myself in her mother's house." Miss Agatha's thin cheek became instantly pink. She turned in her seat and regarded her sisters with grave solicitude in her eyes. "Priscilla, Alice, Mary, Matilda, _and_ Prudence, leave the room," she said. Four needles were promptly thrust into the unfinished work, and the four sisters, who were echoes of Miss Agatha, and the youngest of whom was thirty, rose obediently and followed slowly Prudence's more alert retreat. When they had passed beyond sight of the window Miss Agatha turned apologetically to her friend. "Of course," she explained earnestly, "I couldn't discuss that subject in front of the girls." Mrs North, realising the delicacy of the position, generously acquiesced.