But a warm hand over Sally’s saucy mouth, and a protesting—­“Sally Lane, if you begin that sort of thing I won’t live a minute in your west wing,”—­put an end to the stage directions.

“All right, dear,” agreed Sally.  “We won’t talk any such silly stuff.  We’ll be four little country girls together, playing in the hay, and if we want to go barefoot we will—­when there’s nobody to see.  But I hope, don’t you, Jo? that ‘Miss Carew’ isn’t as grand as she sounds!”

CHAPTER XIII

AFTERNOON TEA

“I feel,” said Sally Lane, impressively, “that the way to receive them properly is to have afternoon tea on the lawn.  What is the use of having a lawn—­even though it’s still rather hummocky—­and four magnificent ancestral oaks—­ancestral oaks sounds like an English novel—­if we don’t have afternoon tea on It—­under Them?”

She stood in the doorway of the front room in the west wing, where Mrs. Burnside and Josephine were sitting, the one busy with some small piece of sewing, the other writing letters at a desk.

“Are they coming over before we call on them?” Josephine inquired, with poised pen.  “Coming to-day?  Why, they only arrived last night.”

“I saw Mr. Ferry this morning, and he said he did not want to wait for us to come over with our hats and gloves on and call, he wanted to bring the girls and his mother over this afternoon, so as to lose no time in having them find out what was on the farther side of the hedge.  I asked him why he hadn’t brought them with him then—­it was at eight o’clock this morning.  But he said he wanted to bring them himself, and he was then on his way to his car—­otherwise he thought he should not have hesitated at all on account of the hour.  He said they were crazy to come.”

“Sally!  He didn’t say they were crazy to come.”

“He didn’t use that particular word, perhaps—­men never do, of course.  But he said ‘eager,’ or ‘anxious,’ or something like that—­it means the same thing.  Evidently they’ve been told all about us.  What would you give, Jo Burnside, to know how we’ve been described?”

“We probably haven’t been described.  Men never describe people.  They just say, ‘She’s all right, you’ll like her,’ or something equally vague.”

“It would give me a chance to wear my lilac muslin,” mused Sally quite irrelevantly, but Josephine caught her meaning.

“Afternoon tea on the lawn?  Then do let’s have it.  Anything to see you in that lilac muslin.”

“Then we’ll trail over the lawn to meet them—­only the lilac muslin doesn’t trail—­and we’ll hold out our hands at a medium sort of angle, so that we’ll be prepared to reciprocate whatever sort of high-low shake fresh from abroad they give us.  Since Dorothy Chase came back last fall she gives a side-to-side jerk that stops your breath short just where it happens to be at the moment.  What do you suppose they’ll be like?  Young ladies from two years’ residence in Germany, or just plain, jolly girls?”