“Never mind,” Kate said briskly, “a few extra things won’t be in the way. Now see here, Hugh, go in and shave, I’ll bring your hot water, then dress, your brown suit and your new Panama—I wonder where your travelling cap is? No need to get flurried, you can have twenty minutes to dress and then take a comfortable half-hour for lunch. Larkin’s here, luckily; I can send him for a wagonette, so you won’t have to waste time walking to the station.”

Hugh felt his chin.

“I suppose I must shave? I shouldn’t meet any one by this train.” He looked at her anxiously for indulgence.

“Certainly you must,” she said severely, and then he knew there was no hope.

“Do you want any of this with you?” she added, nodding across to his paper-strewn table, “or shall I put it all in a safe place till you come back?”

“Certainly there is not,” said Kate decisively, “you don’t stir from here without a comfortable lunch.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “see here, K, I’ll leave her stuff here on the desk in this envelope, and you take it over to her and tell her I think if she goes more on these lines the tale will be stronger.”

“All right,” said Kate, “and what about the other tale,—the one for the Melbourne Review?”

Hugh hastily stuffed some more MS into an envelope, wrote a few lines to accompany it, and scribbled an address.

“See it is posted at once,” he said; “I’ve addressed it to Miss Brown, and told her to type it and to post it on to the Review.”

“I’m sure I could start again,” said Kate, “let me do it as usual.”

But a slight eye trouble she had suffered from lately had made Hugh lock his sister’s machine for the time.

“Don’t waste time talking,” he said, “just send it to the post as it is.”

“Oh, very well,” said Kate, “Larkin can take it with him. Now go and shave instantly and, remember—your brown suit.”

He looked at her gratefully. She was as good-tempered as ever; not in the least flustered or put out.

“Jove, K,” he said, “I should be a fool to marry. For real solid satisfaction give me a sister.”

“Why?” said Kate amusedly. “Do you think your wife wouldn’t pack your bag for you?”

He considered Bee for a moment in a wifely, packing attitude, then Dora.

“Not all wives,” he said a little vaguely. “At all events they’d pout and worry to know why I was going and what the horrid telegram was about, and when was I coming back, and where was I going to stay—and so on till the train was lost. And look at you—not a word!”

“Oh, I should have asked you fast enough—when you came back,” said Kate, “and that is the same thing.”

“No, faith, it’s not, Kate; I’d have had leisure to invent my own account by that time,” said Hugh.

Hugh struck a match.

“I can tell you now, as there’s time. I felt I wasn’t making money fast enough by books for our old age, K, and I’ve been speculating a bit. It’s helped to worry me and keep me from work lately. But the shares are rising and I’m going down to be on the spot.”

Then the wagonette drove up and he seized his bag and his hat, and Kate ran after him to the gate with his pipe.

When Miss Bibby heard from the children that he had gone away, she sighed deeply. And at night when the little ones were all asleep, and Anna, her face smeared with Pauline’s sunburn cream, her hair damp with the preparation bought to improve Muffie’s thin hair, and her teeth ashine with the family tooth powder, was on her way to bed, and the mist had crept up to the windows and wrapped everything in its eerie shroud, Miss Bibby sighed again.

MAX RUNS AMUCK

Greenways was overwhelmed with horror. It felt it ought to draw a veil of mist round its face and shrink from the public gaze instead of standing there brazenly smiling as usual amid its trees and flowers and pretending it was the abode of innocence and content.

Miss Bibby was extremely upset, sufficiently so to be nearly helpless in the crisis. The little girls whispered together with horrified and excited eyes and more than inclined to a theory that nothing short of a cable to New Zealand recalling their parents could adequately deal with the present situation.

Anna, who had quarrelled with her baker, said she was not in the least surprised, for men and boys were all the same, downright black at heart.

But Max stood fast in his iniquity.

No one knew where he could have possibly heard the hair-raising phrase. Certainly there was the gardener, Blake, about the premises who, being of the downright black-hearted sex, might have let fall the words Max had evidently garnered and laid by with such care and accuracy until occasion offered.

But he was so surly and monosyllabic a man that the children gave him the widest of berths, and therefore that theory was unlikely.

Anna aspersed the character of Larkin. A boy with hair that colour, she maintained, must be subject to periodical explosions, and it was probably during one of them that Max had secreted his bit of dynamite. But the little girls gave Larkin the warmest testimonials. In all the time they had known him he had never been guilty of anything stronger than “My jiggery!”

It all began with a bib at breakfast time.

When Anna would have tied it around Max’s neck, as she or some other person in her position had done for years, he jerked his head suddenly aside. “Take it away,” he said.

Max ducked skilfully just as Anna brought the tapes together.

“Just look at ’im,” said the girl.

“Come, come, Max,” said Miss Bibby, “you don’t want to spoil that pretty coat with your porridge. Why, it’s your new coat with a pocket in! Let Anna tie it now, quickly.”

Again Anna essayed her task. Max held still till the square of huckaback portraying the economic existence of Jack Sprat and his wife was well beneath his chin, and the tapes gathered once more up into Anna’s hands.

Then he gave a movement like a plunging horse, seized the offending article and flung it with all his force across the table where it fell and floated upon the milk Muffie had poured over her porridge.

“Very well, Anna,” said Miss Bibby, “take the bib away and you need not wait. Master Max does not want any breakfast.”

This was quite true, for Master Max had quite satisfied his morning appetite by a surreptitious ten minutes at the mulberry tree while the three little girls were having their hair brushed.

“You mean, may I?” Miss Bibby said mechanically.

“Well, may I?”

“Certainly not. You will sit quite still as a gentleman should when ladies are still eating.”

Max cast a lowering glance at the ladies.

“Well, make her hurry,” he said; “look at her taking anover lot of leam.” He glared at Muffie.

“I shall take six lots of cream, if I choose,” said Muffie. “I’ve got to put something on to take away the taste of your horrid dirty bib.”

“It was a clean one, Muffie, or I should have passed you a fresh plateful,” said Miss Bibby; “at the same time that does not excuse Max for his ill-behaviour. Max, before I can overlook your conduct you must apologize to Muffie and to Anna.”

Muffie looked important; she rather enjoyed being apologized to.

Max sat very square on the big books of his chair; possibly their presence beneath him encouraged his rebellion by reminding him that until he took a firm stand against it a month or two ago a high chair had been considered fitted to his dignity.

“I’ve done wiv bibs,” he announced, and he looked the whole table fairly in the face.

When he stood with his little legs planted far apart and his little hands thrust deep in his knickerbocker pockets, and his little head cocked on one side, some subtle breath of a spirit, masculine and essentially opposed to their own, was wafted towards them.

“I’ve done wiv bibs,” he repeated.

“That will do, Max,” said Miss Bibby, coldly. “I shall consider you in disgrace, until you have told Anna and Muffie you are sorry.”

“I’ve done wiv bibs,” shouted Max.

“Go and stand in that corner, Max,” Miss Bibby said with unexpected sternness in her tone.

Max scrambled off his chair as if he could hardly reach the place indicated fast enough.

He ran right into the corner—gave a hard kick at the skirting board and made a rush for the door.

“I’ve done wiv bibs,” he shrieked, and tore away as fast as his legs could carry him into the garden.

This was ever Miss Bibby’s phrase—ever her gentle optimism. If you lost your temper, your manners, your courage, any of your higher qualities, you had “forgotten yourself,” forgotten the fine, upright man you were by nature and become for a moment the shadowy ghost of that black unknown self that ever dogs one.

“As I have finished, I will ask you to excuse me, little girls,” Miss Bibby continued, rising from her seat. In point of fact, she had not yet consumed the whole of her slender meal, but who was to say what a boy with such a red, fierce little face might be doing?

She crossed the grass with troubled eyes. Max was too busy a little man to have fits like this often.

Now and again in wet weather, certainly, when he could not work off any superfluous steam in the garden, he had lately taken to flinging himself flat on the floor and kicking, if thwarted in any way. And Miss Bibby had vaguely recognized that this was due to his being deprived so long of the healthy moral tone of the presence of his mother and father—the latter in especial.

“He’s only a baby,” she would say excusingly, “and besides, he’s a boy—it’s in him and it’s got to come out,—same as a measle rash. You’d think there’d be some med’cin for it, wouldn’t you?”

Kinross would have enjoyed the notion—the need of a Tonic for Eliminating the Black Corpuscles from the Blood of Boys.

Max saw Miss Bibby coming. In truth he had almost forgotten his recent revolt against law and order, for during his tumultuous passage through the garden, he had come across one of the guinea-pigs that had escaped from its bondage. An exciting chase had followed, but he had won, and in the satisfaction consequent upon victory he might have even been induced to overlook Miss Bibby’s behaviour.

But then he saw the gentle reproach in her eyes, and noted (the Judge himself had not the faculty of lightning observation possessed by his son) the nervous, half-conciliatory trepidation of her manner. He thrust his hands as deeply as they would go into his inadequate pockets and met her gaze unblinking.

Max would have none of such folly.

“I’m me,” he said determinedly.

Miss Bibby sought to gather him up in her arms—the natural instinct. For indeed when your rebel’s “trousers” measure but three inches in the inner seam you cannot regard him as other than a baby.

But he held fast to the wire fence of the guinea-pigs’ run.

“I won’t be nursed,” he said. She stood ten minutes cajoling him, wheedling, coaxing, threatening. No, he would not return to his corner and work out his punishment, even though the punisher was eagerly offering to reduce the duration of it to “exactly three minutes, Max darling,—see, by this pretty little watch, and then we can all be friends again.”

No, Max would have no traffic at all in the offer of such an ignominious position.

“Well, see here, Max,” said the helpless lady recognizing and bowing at last to the stronger will, “if I let you off the corner will you run in and kiss Muffie and Anna to show you are sorry?” (The word “apologize” was eliminated now from this last treaty.)

No, Max would not kiss either Anna or Muffie. They were both “bad girls.”

“I can run licker than you,” was Max’s reply, and he ducked beneath her arm and dashed across the garden.

Miss Bibby’s blood rose high and she started to follow him. But how may a lady who for at least twenty years has done nothing but walk sedately ever expect or wildly hope to catch up a pair of brown muscular little legs? She was brought up panting, with her hand at her side before they had circled the bamboos three times and the quarry was plainly as fresh as ever. But:

was Miss Bibby’s attitude now. She called to Anna to help with the chase. And Anna came cheerfully as well as of necessity, for Max had crushed mulberries on her snowy kitchen table, in an endeavour to “invent cochineal,” and it would take her hours to eradicate the stain.

The little girls came too—they felt it was more than half a game, for Max’s face was perfectly smiling and good-natured.

Surely, surely by tactics like these they drove him right into a corner. Had there been a fence he would have shown fight a little longer by scrambling up it and continuing the chase on the other side. But they had headed him to a hedge, an African box thorn hedge, and there was nothing more to be done. So he stuck his legs apart, and put his hands in his pockets and surveyed his captors as they closed in round him. And it seemed satisfactory to his self-respect that it had taken five of them—two quite grown-up, too—to beat him.

But Anna was singularly without the capacity for admiring fine deeds and simply grasped him firmly around the middle and bore him to the house.

He kicked all the way, merely to maintain his self-respect.

“Where shall I put ’im?” gasped the girl, stumbling along the hall, the other four at her heels.

“Here, here,” said Miss Bibby, opening the sitting-room door, and running across the floor to close and lock the French windows.

Anna stood him down on his feet and gave him one good, if unauthorized, shake for all the kicks she had received.

“There!” she said, as a woman will.

The boy glared round at his victors, now all grouped at the door.

“You beasly girls,” he said.

A LESSON IN DISCIPLINE

That is why “Greenways” should have hidden its shamed head in one of the mountain’s tender mists instead of gaily smiling out at the world that morning.

When Miss Kinross rode briskly up the drive, perhaps an hour later, she had no suspicion that so truly shocking an occurrence had befallen the sunny place.

She leaned her bicycle against a ficus-covered post and crossed the verandah, a little surprised at the silence, for she was accustomed on her morning visits to being run into by Max on the red tricycle and to find little girls everywhere swinging, skipping, hoop-bowling, or doll-carrying.

She crossed the verandah and rang the bell; the door was closed—a most unusual thing.

Anna appeared and seemed to hesitate about asking her in.

“Certainly,” said Miss Kinross. “Is Miss Bibby in?”

“Ye-e-es,” said Anna, and opened the dining-room door.

The little girls were all here. Miss Bibby had said they might do exactly as they liked this morning. Pauline sat crocheting at a grey woollen shoulder cape which was destined for some old woman in some old asylum, and was among the least interesting of her work. Lynn was reading. Not face downward, on a rug and with swiftly-moving eyes and hurrying breath, as was her custom with a living book, but she had merely picked up the History of England and sat with it quite listlessly on a chair. And Muffie was standing at the window, breathing on a pane from time to time and then drearily drawing figures upon her breath.

How could one be gay and do as one liked with the sitting-room door shut and locked on Little Knickerbockers?

But Spencer held out no helping hand. The lines on her forehead deepened.

“Are you all well?” said Miss Kinross, coming forward to shake hands with her. “How do you do, little girls? How are the coughs? And where is my little cavalier?”

“He—he—” said Miss Bibby, hesitating a second, then deciding not quite to conceal the outrage since here might be wisdom. Surely here must be wisdom; for could any one dwell side by side with an author like Hugh Kinross and not absorb it in every pore?

“Max has been,” said Miss Bibby, “not—not quite good, I am sorry to say. He—I have been obliged to leave him by himself in the sitting-room.”

“Oh dear,” said Kate, “poor little chap; what has he done?”

Miss Bibby looked helplessly from one little girl to the other. She could not actually repeat the terrible language, and yet she did so badly need help in the emergency.

“He—I regret to say he quite forgot himself and used some naughty words,” she said. “What would you do in my position, Miss Kinross?”

“But he hasn’t said he is sorry,” said Miss Bibby anxiously. “I told him that when he rang the sitting-room bell I would go at once, for I should know it meant he was sorry.”

“And hasn’t he rung it, the young scamp?” said Kate, smiling.

“Well, yes, he did, several times,” admitted Miss Bibby unhappily; “but when I opened the door he said he had rung to say he wasn’t sorry.”

Kate laughed outright.

“What a man he will make!” she said admiringly.

Miss Bibby looked as if she did not quite follow the train of reasoning.

“So I took the bell away,” she continued, “and told him I would come every half hour and ask through the door if he was sorry. The second half hour is nearly up.”

“Oh,” said Kate impulsively, “let’s go and peep through the verandah window. Half an hour is a frightful time, Miss Bibby; he will have cried himself sick. Think what a baby he is!”

They tiptoed round to the verandah, the little girls at their heels, and they peeped cautiously through the window.

Kate was convulsed.

“Why—why,” said Miss Bibby, “how did he get his tricycle? It certainly was not there when I went in last. Who gave him his tricycle?”

“I did, Miss Bibby,” said Lynn meekly. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Oh, Lynn!” said Miss Bibby.

“But he looked so lonely,” said the little girl piteously.

Miss Bibby went round at once to the other door and demanded “Trike,” though Kate strongly advised against it.

“I’ve quite fin’shed with it,” said the rebel sweetly, and dismounted without a struggle.

Miss Bibby wheeled it out, somewhat ignominiously.

“A’right,” said Max cheerfully.

The ladies went back to the dining-room and conversation took a wider trend, for Miss Bibby seemed not too certain now of the judgment of the author’s sister.

“I brought you round that book I promised,” said Miss Kinross, “but I haven’t found your story yet. I have hunted everywhere again for it, and I cannot think where Hugh could have put it. Are you sure you are not in a hurry for it? I could write to Hugh, of course, though I really don’t know his address; he only told me Melbourne.”

“Oh, no,” said Miss Bibby, “I would not have him worried on any account. A few days will not make any difference. I can wait until he returns. And it is possible”—her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkled with the hope—“that he has taken the MS with him and means to look through it while he is away.”

“But he did look through it,” said Kate; “he told me he had spent all the morning over it. That is what makes me doubtful that he can have taken it. He said so distinctly that it was on his desk and that I was to take it across to you.”

“Well,” she said, “I must be off if I am to get my ride. But I tell you I shall not enjoy it a bit without the little man on the little red tricycle pounding along behind me to the corner as usual. You couldn’t find it possible to let him out now? He must feel good by this. You never feel naughty as long as this, do you, Muffie?”

“Never,” said Muffie stoutly.

“Boys are so different,” sighed Miss Bibby.

“Well, let us have one more peep before I go,” pleaded Kate.

They tiptoed round to the verandah window again. But this time there was no sign whatever of the rebel though both doors were still locked on the outside. Miss Bibby flew back in terror to the door that opened into the hall; she had taken the key of the verandah doorway. But as her eyes went wildly searching among the furniture they fell upon a dusty little sandal with a brown little foot attached. The boy had crawled so completely underneath the low sofa that nothing more of him was visible.

Not a toe quivered.

Miss Bibby stooped down and laid a hand on the foot; the muscles of it lay soft and resistless beneath her fingers.

“Max,” she said again.

“Oh, oh,” said Lynn, whose nature was easily strung high, “is he dead! Oh, is he dead!” She leapt across the room.

But Miss Bibby was gently drawing more of the unresisting body into view—the scratched and chubby knees that succeeded the brown feet, and that were perfect little “calendars of distress,” the three-inch “trousers,” the crumpled tunic, the little smudgy face.

“Fast asleep!” she said tenderly, and gathered him very softly up into her arms.

“Fast asleep!” said Kate, and something stirred at her heart and made her long to gather up the chubby rogue herself.

“I will lay him down on the sofa,” whispered Miss Bibby, but made no haste to do so, so sweet was the sense of the warm, helpless child body in her arms.

But when the little girls had flown to make a nest with cushions and proclaimed it ready, what further excuse had she? She moved gently across the floor with her burden. But the motion broke the boy’s light sleep and he stirred in her arms and opened half an eye. It fell on Kate.

Miss Bibby sat down on the sofa with him.

“There,” she said soothingly; “hush, go to sleep, love.”

Love of course instantly opened his eyes wide.

“I’m going wiv her,” he said, looking at Kate. “I always go wiv her to the corner.”

“But my little boy was naughty,” murmured Miss Bibby in his ear. “Is he my own little good boy again?”

Max nodded.

“Get the licycle,” he commanded the three little sisters who were looking at him yearningly.

They flew to obey.

“I’m hungly,” he announced.

“Yes, yes—you had no breakfast, darling—Pauline, quickly, some arrowroot biscuits and a glass of milk.”

Anna herself brought in the little tray; she had a soft spot in her heart for this member of the black-hearted sex after all.

“I put cream on them for you, darling,” she said, and proffered the biscuits.

Max munched away. “I like cleam,” he said, licking it lovingly off one biscuit.

Miss Bibby blushed.

“You are sorry, aren’t you, darling?” she said, feeling after her formula as a matter of duty.

Max nodded again.

“Say you are sorry, darling boy,” she whispered.

Max patted her cheek and then stole his little arm round her neck in a perfectly cherubic way.

“I’m solly,” he said; then he seemed to realize more clearly that the lady’s honour had to be vindicated before all these “girls,” and he repeated more loudly and without being asked, “I’m velly solly.”

“You darling!” cried the delighted Miss Bibby, and clasped and kissed him again.

Pauline wheeled “Trike” out to the foot of the steps, Lynn rushed for the ever lost boy-hat, Muffie flew to pick a stone up from the path before the little wheel.

Then a flash of irresistible humour shone in Kate Kinross’s eyes.

“Max,” she said with exceeding suddenness, “what are you sorry for?”

Max mounted his machine from behind and settled himself in his saddle.

IN PRINT AT LAST

Pauline and Muffie had gone flying down to the gate to run behind the bicycle and tricycle as far as the corner where the little red tricycle had always to turn and come back.

Lynn hung back a moment.

“Take care of this till I come back, will you, Miss Bibby?” she said, “I’m keeping it for Max.”

This was a paper boat that Kate had cleverly folded for Lynn while she waited, using a sheet she tore haphazard from a periodical that she had under her arm, part of the morning’s post.

Miss Bibby took the boat, and when Lynn had darted off after the other young ones, she examined it with a view to finding out how Kate made these clever little things that the children so greatly delighted in.

Her eyes tore up and down the folded sail;—this sentence was different—sharper, pithier, better rounded than she had written it. A soliloquy was missing there—and better so, its inclusion would have been a mistake. Oh, how good, how good he was! Her quivering fingers fumbled with the folding—Lynn and Max would forgive her for spoiling their boat when they knew—when she showed them her name in print.

Ah, how hungry were her eyes for the sight of it, the sight of the simple name “Agnes Bibby” at the head of her first signed story—the story that was to take away the reproach from the name that the ill-starred interview had brought!

Then the heavens clapped down on her head and the deadliest sickness assailed her.

The heading of the columns said the Hypocrites, and the line beneath “By Hugh Kinross.”

A MASTER MIND

Hugh had come back. When he had gone away he had taken with him one small portmanteau that went easily into the luggage rack above his head. But on the return journey he had quite a little sum to pay for excess luggage.

For instance no railway carries a motor bicycle for the consideration tendered to it for a passenger ticket. And a motor bicycle was amongst the things turned out on the Burunda platform when Hugh came back, and, to the astonishment of Kate who had gone to meet him, claimed by him.

“My dear fellow,” she exclaimed when assured it was unmistakably his, “how glad I am! I knew you would come to it sooner or later. Oh, what rides we will have together!” Her face beamed.

“Preserve us!” said Hugh; “Melbourne is not responsible for developing maniacal symptoms in me, I assure you. It’s for you, of course.”

“But it turns your little face red,” said Hugh, “and makes your little heart beat too fast on these hills. This one won’t.”

And then it was that Kate discovered the motor attachment of the new machine and was divided between ecstasy and economic qualms.

Hugh swiftly laid the latter. The speculation had gone well—better than his best expectations; he had to break out somewhere, he said.

The breaking out included a tricycle for Muffie, who was ever in hot water with Max for stealing rides on “Trike” just when that gentleman needed the steed himself. A splendid set of croquet was for Pauline, who delighted in the game and had been overwhelmed with sorrow because one night, when mallets and balls “happened” to be left out on the lawn all night, a vagrant cow with a depraved appetite came in and, as Paul said mournfully, “went and chewed corners all over the balls.”

For Lynn, who had been heard bewailing the fact that all the books she loved had been left in the other house, was a large parcel containing six of the most delightful fairy-books in the world.

There they lay, three bound in scarlet and one in green, The Horty Stepmother, by Pauline Lomax; The Fairy who Had, by Lynn Lomax; There was a Dog, by Muffie Lomax; and The Mother who said No, by Max Lomax. Kate was delighted with them and said she would give much to be at the elbow of the Judge and Mrs. Lomax in New Zealand when these choice volumes from their gifted offspring reached them.

For Miss Bibby too there was an offering.

“There aren’t many modern women left who can fitly wear these things,” Hugh said when he showed it to Kate, “but it struck me that it would become a certain old-world air that lingers about Agnes Bibby.”

“Ho, ho,” said Kate to herself, and stole a glance at him; but she allowed warmly that the thing was very pretty.

It was a chatelaine made of finely-fretted silver. The customary thimble, scissors and other useful and feminine trifles dangled there, but there was also added a delicately-chased case that might have been expected to hold a bodkin, but contained indeed a very up-to-date fountain-pen, gold-mounted.

Kate acknowledged the disadvantage.

“Though I did stick to a skirt pocket long after the dressmakers had declared them anathema,” she said, “but there was always the danger of sitting on your pen or having it leak a wide black mark in the back width of your best frock. Even the sacred repository behind the ear that will lodge a penny pen refuses to accommodate a stout and slippery fountain one. But with that arrangement she will be able to make notes all day.”

Hugh hastened to display a miniature note-book, also made to hang suspended from the waist.

“She will be armed at all points, you see,” he said, “and the minute she sees men like columns walking, as some one says, she can jot them down.”

“But what are all the other things?” asked Kate, pointing to several still unaccounted-for parcels and hampers standing about the verandah just where the driver had set them down.

“To-morrow’s fiddlestick!” said Kate unbelievingly.

“’Tis, I assure you,” said Hugh; “I’m giving a grand picnic to-morrow at the Falls to celebrate my safe return. Thought of it in bed last night, telephoned the X.Y.Z. Company to pack a bit of lunch that would keep a day and to meet the train with it, and there you are,” he waved his hand at the hampers.

“A bit of lunch!” said Kate sarcastically. “Are you sure there is enough there to take the edge off our appetites?”

“Don’t get anxious,” said Hugh, “there’s a little more to follow in the morning—little things that don’t keep well, you know. We can easily pick them up at the station as we pass.”

“Little things like——?” said Kate.

“Oh, mustard,” said Hugh—“I remembered how you dislike stale mustard. And butter—you can’t leave butter shut up, you know—and other little things.”

“Half a dozen of everything, I suppose,” Kate said, attacking the hampers. “H’m, champagne.”

“Well, you’ve got to drink the health of those shares.”

“Poultry.”

“Oh, it will keep.”

“Peaches—pineapples—French confectionery.”

“Well, my dear girl, you will all want a square feed when you get to the bottom of those Falls.”

“And who are we all, pray?” inquired Kate.

“Well,” said Hugh, “there are the ducky little girls, that’s two. I sent them a wire each this morning and had their acceptances before the X.Y.Z. got to work.”

“That was smart,” said Kate.

“Yes, I rather pride myself on my executive abilities when I’ve once got going,” said Hugh. “Next I wired Edith and told her to stay away and Gowan, too. Told her you’d chaperone. I don’t want the gloomy brewer’s soul going by me like a stork at my own picnic. Told her to send along the kids though—all five of them.”

“That’s seven,” said Kate, “and ourselves, nine,—anyone else? I hope so, for there’s enough here for nineteen, and I hate waste.”

“Oh, I sent wires over the road, of course.”

“Half a dozen wires?” said Kate.

“Oh, no,” said Hugh innocently, “there are only five of them.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “I was only going to send one to Miss Bibby, but then it struck me how pleased a kid would be to get a telegram. I know I never did or I’d have burst with pride in my promising youth.”

“Twelve wires at—at? How many words, sir?”

“Well,” said Hugh, “they wouldn’t have cost so much only I took a fancy to drop into poetry with them. And in spite of precedents the operator declined to do it as a friend.”

“Just a minute,” said Kate, “half of those wires are doomed to be wasted. Your executive ability is a thing to marvel at, I grant you, but you overlooked the little fact that Lomax-cum-Whooping-Cough may not foregather round a tablecloth with Gowan-plus-Perfect-Health.”

Hugh certainly looked nonplussed at this.

“It would be a moral impossibility for one of the parties unaided by the other to eat all this,” pursued Kate.

“My good woman,” said Hugh, “go and put the perishables in the ice-chest. My master mind will soon deal with the difficulty.”

“Well?” said Kate when only a heap of fine ash remained.

“Quite well,” said Hugh. “Both parties shall attend and not the ghost of a whoop shall be exchanged. I ordered two large sociables,—the drivers will have instructions not to approach nearer than thirty feet within each other. A whoop microbe would hardly travel thirty feet.”

“Well,” said Kate, “as far as that is concerned I don’t see that Edith need have any anxiety. She might pass a wagonette with scarlet fever convalescents herself any day. But what about the actual picnic? Muffie defines this word as eating nice things down a gully. Could we comfortably pass sandwiches to each other there at a distance of thirty feet?”

“Well,” laughed Kate, “it is one way out of the difficulty. I certainly should not have thought of anything myself but of postponing one party until another day.”

“No,” said Hugh complacently, “it takes the strategy of a general or a genius to fix up little things like this.”

Four breathless figures came dashing over the road and through the “Tenby” gate round to the side verandah.

“Oh, oh,” said Lynn imploringly, “you have finished your tea, haven’t you? Miss Bibby wouldn’t let us ’sturb you before.”

“We counted up to a thousand to give you time,” said Pauline, “and we could eat enough tea in a hundred and fifty—unless there were drop cakes.”

“We’re coming,” shouted Max, and he flourished the rhymed blue telegram that he had carried about all day.

“Did you get our answers?” cried Lynn.

“We paid for them ourselves,” said Pauline. “Miss Bibby just wanted to send one answer and say ‘All accept with pleasure’! But we just wouldn’t, and we all went to the post and we told the woman just what to put, and it would have been a lot better only we didn’t have much time to think, only while we walked up the hill, and Lynn did the most, ’cause she can always think of the rhymingest words, and we’d have made them much longer only we could only afford ninepence each, and we had to lend Max threepence, ’cause he’d only got sixpence left.”

She stopped for sheer lack of breath.

“Ninepence each!” cried Kate, “and you once thought of writing some articles on teaching Thrift to young Australia, Hugh!”

“But that was before I was really acquainted with young Australia,” said Hugh.

“Did you like them?” asked Lynn anxiously, “I was ’fraid you wouldn’t like grin, but nothing else would rhyme.”