steps.

Luncheon in the cozy dining-room at Hillside
that day was not entirely a success. At least
there were not present exactly the harmony and
tranquillity that are conceded to be the best
sauce for one's food. The wedding, of course,
was the all-absorbing topic of conversation; and
Billy, between Aunt Hannah's attempts to be
polite, Marie's to be sweet-tempered, Mrs. Hartwell's
to be dictatorial, and her own to be pacifying
as well as firm, had a hard time of it. If it had
not been for two or three diversions created by
little Kate, the meal would have been, indeed, a
dismal failure.

But little Kate--most of the time the
personification of proper little-girlhood--had a
disconcerting faculty of occasionally dropping a
word here, or a question there, with startling
effect. As, for instance, when she asked Billy
``Who's going to boss your wedding?'' and again
when she calmly informed her mother that when _she_
was married she was not going to have any wedding
at all to bother with, anyhow. She was going to
elope, and she should choose somebody's chauffeur,
because he'd know how to go the farthest and fastest
so her mother couldn't catch up with her and
tell her how she ought to have done it.