It is afternoon, and the morning wind, heaving with too much fragrance, has lain down to sleep.  A great warm stillness is on the garden and house.  The sweet Nancies no longer bow.  They stand straight up, all a-row, making the whole place honeyed.  The school-room is one great nosegay.  Every vase and jug, and cup, and pot and pan and pipkin that we can command, is crammed with heavy-headed daffodils, with pale-cheeked primroses, with wine-colored gilly-flowers, every thing that spring has thrust most plentifully into our eager hands.

The boys have been out fishing.

Algy and Bobby have been humorously trying to drown the Brat.

He looks small and cold in consequence, and his little pert nose is tinged with a chilly pink.  Half an hour ago, mother called me away to a private conference, exciting thereby a mighty curiosity not unmixed with envy in my brethren.

Our colloquy is ended now, and I am reentering the school-room.

“Well, what was it? out with it,” cries Algy, almost before I am inside the door again.  Algy is sitting more than half—­more than three-quarters out of the window, balancing himself with great nicety on the sill.  He is in the elegant neglige of a decrepit shooting-jacket, no waistcoat, and no collar.

“What have you been doing to your face?” says Bobby, drawing nigh, and peering with artless interest into the details of my appearance; “it is the color of this” (pointing to a branch of red rhibes, which is hanging its drooped flowers, and joining its potent spice to the other flower-scents).

“Is it?” I answer, putting both hands to my cheeks, to feel their temperature.  “I dare say! so would yours be, perhaps, if you had, like me, been having a—­” I stop suddenly.

“Having a what?”

“I will not say what I was going to say,” I cry, emphatically, “it was nonsensical!”

“But what has she told you, Nancy?” asks Barbara, who, enervated by the first hot day, is languishing in the rocking-chair, slowly seesawing.  “What could it have been that she might not as well have said before us all?”

“You had better try and guess,” I reply, darkly.

“I will not, for one,” says Bobby, doggedly, “I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, ‘What is most like a hen stealing?’”

“It is not much like that,” say I, demurely, “and, in fact, when one comes to think of it, it can hardly be called a conundrum at all!”

“I do not believe it is any thing worth hearing,” remarks the Brat, skeptically, “or you would have come out with it long ago! you never could have kept in to yourself!”

“Not worth hearing!” cry I, triumphantly raising my voice, “is not it?  That is all you know about it!”

“Do not wrangle, children,” says Algy from the window; “but, Nancy, if you have not told us before the clock gets to the quarter” (looking impressively at the slowly-traveling hands), “I shall think it right to—­”