"Too late," said Lottie from the rug. She burst into sudden laughter, loud
but not unmelodious. "What rubbish we are talking! Seventeen to-morrow, and
Addie is nearly twenty; and sometimes I think I must be a hundred!"

"Well, you are talking nonsense now," Mrs. Blake exclaimed. "Why, you baby!
only last November you would go into that wet meadow by the rectory to play
trap-and-ball with Robin and Jack. And such a fuss as there was if one
wanted to make you the least tidy and respectable!"

"Was that last November?" Lottie stared thoughtfully into space. "Queer
that last November should be so many years ago, isn't it? Poor little Cock
Robin! I met him in the lane the day before he went away. They will keep
him in jackets, and he hates them so! I laughed at him, and told him to be
a good little boy and mind his book. He didn't seem to like it, somehow."

"I dare say he didn't," said Addie, who had been silently recovering
herself: "there's no mistake about it when you laugh at any one."

"There shall be no mistake about anything I do," Lottie asserted. "I'm
going to bed now." She sprang to her feet and stood looking at her sister:
"What jolly hair you've got, Addie!"

"Yours is just as thick, or thicker," said Addie.

"Each individual hair is a good deal thicker, if you mean that.
'Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs!' That's what Percy quoted to
me one day when I was grumbling, and I said I wasn't sure he wasn't rude.
Addie, are Horace and Percival fond of each other?"