were allowed to carry on their studies in the noble old garden, in the
summer-houses and pleasure domes which the extinct Mauleverers had made
for themselves in their day of power. Grinding at history, grammar, and
geography did not seem so oppressive a burden when it could be done
under the shade of spreading cedars, amid the scent of roses, in an
atmosphere of colour and light. Even Ida's labours seemed a little easier
when she and her pupils sat in a fast-decaying old summer-house in the
rose-garden, with a glimpse of sunlit river flashing athwart the roses.

So the time wore on until the last week in July, and then all the school
was alive with excitement, and every one was looking forward to the great
event of the term, 'breaking up.' 'Old Pew,' had sent out her invitations
for a garden party, an actual garden party--not a mere namby-pamby
entertainment among the girls themselves, in which a liberal supply of
blanc-mange and jam tarts was expected to atone for the absence of the
outside world. Miss Pew had taken it into her head that Mauleverer Manor
ought to be better known, and that a garden party would be a good
advertisement. With this idea, she had ordered a hundred invitation
cards, and had disseminated them among the most eligible of her old
pupils, and the parents and guardians of those damsels now at the Manor.
The good old gardens, where velvet greensward and cedars of Lebanon cost
little labour to maintain in perfect order, were worthy to be exhibited.
The roses, Miss Dulcibella's peculiar care, were, in that lady's opinion,
equal to anything outside Chatsworth or Trentham. A garden party, by all
means, said Miss Dulcibella, and she gave the young ladies to understand
that the whole thing was her doing.

'I waited till Sarah was in a good temper,' she told her satellites, half
a dozen or so of the elder girls who worshipped her, and who, in the
slang phraseology of the school, were known as Miss Dulcie's 'cracks,'