We were sitting on the porch of the cottage at Lake Penzance when I
received the letter, and I read it aloud. "Humph!" said Tish, putting
down the stocking she was knitting and looking over her spectacles at
me--"Likes her Presbyterianism pure and believes in a large family! How
old is she? Forty?"

"Eighteen or twenty," I replied, looking at the letter. "I'm not anxious
to go. She'll probably find me frivolous."

Tish put on her spectacles and took the letter. "I think it's your duty,
Lizzie," she said when she'd read it through. "But that young woman
needs handling. We'd better all go. We can motor over in half a day."

That was how it happened that Bettina Bailey, sitting on Eliza Bailey's
front piazza, decked out in chintz cushions,--the piazza, of course,--saw
a dusty machine come up the drive and stop with a flourish at the steps.
And from it alight, not one chaperon, but three.

After her first gasp Bettina was game. She was a pretty girl in a white
dress and bore no traces in her face of any stern religious proclivities.

"I didn't know--" she said, staring from one to the other of us. "Mother
said--that is--won't you go right upstairs and have some tea and lie
down?" She had hardly taken her eyes from Tish, who had lifted the
engine hood and was poking at the carbureter with a hairpin.

"No, thanks," said Tish briskly. "I'll just go around to the garage and
oil up while I'm dirty. I've got a short circuit somewhere. Aggie, you