love-pats, and then the girls, having hung their hats and coats in the
hall, walked quietly in to greet Aunt Charlotte. It was a fixed rule
at the private school that there should never be any haste in reaching
places in the schoolroom.

"It matters not that you are little girls, or that you are at school,"
Mrs. Grayson would say; "let me always have the pleasure of seeing you
enter the class-room in as gentle a manner as you would enter a
drawing-room," and her pupils took pleasure in doing as she wished.

The broad window-seats were banked with flowering plants, and as the
children took their places they thought it the brightest, cheeriest
schoolroom in the world.

As if to show that he also had a place in Aunt Charlotte's class, Pompey
ran across the floor and sprang up into a space on one window-seat
between two large flowerpots, where he could enjoy a sun-bath.

Katie Dean, with her little Cousin Reginald, now entered, just in time
to avoid being late.

"I thought you said your cousin was coming," whispered Mollie, but Aunt
Charlotte had opened her Testament, and was commencing to read, so Nina
only shook her head, and Mollie saw that she must wait until recess to
know what Nina would say.

"'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of
God,'" read Aunt Charlotte, and every girl looked towards Flossie
Barnet, who was always trying to say a pleasant word of an absent
friend, or to coax two playmates, who had become estranged, to be fast