“Patience, if you don’t stop repeating what everyone says, I shall—­”

“If you speak to mother—­then you’ll be repeating,” Patience declared.  “Maybe, I oughtn’t to have said those things before—­company.”

“I think we’d better go back to the house now,” Pauline suggested.

“Sextoness Jane says,” Patience remarked, “that she’d have sure admired to have a horse and rig like that, when she was a girl.  She says, she doesn’t suppose you’ll be passing by her house very often.”

“And, now, please,” Hilary pleaded, when she had been established in her hammock on the side porch, with her mother in her chair close by, and Pauline sitting on the steps, “I want to hear—­everything.  I’m what Miranda calls ‘fair mazed.’”

So Pauline told nearly everything, blurring some of the details a little and getting to that twenty-five dollars a month, with which they were to do so much, as quickly as possible.

“O Paul, really,” Hilary sat up among her cushions—­“Why, it’ll be—­riches, won’t it?”

“It seems so.”

“But—­Oh, I’m afraid you’ve spent all the first twenty-five on me; and that’s not a fair division—­is it, Mother Shaw?”

“We used it quite according to Hoyle,” Pauline insisted.  “We got our fun that way, didn’t we, Mother Shaw?”

Their mother smiled.  “I know I did.”

“All the same, after this, you’ve simply got to ‘drink fair, Betsy,’ so remember,” Hilary warned them.

“Bedtime, Patience,” Mrs. Shaw said, and Patience got slowly out of her big, wicker armchair.

“I did think—­seeing there was company,—­that probably you’d like me to stay up a little later to-night.”

“If the ‘company’ takes my advice, she’ll go, too,” her mother answered.

“The ‘company’ thinks she will.”  Hilary slipped out of the hammock.  “Mother, do you suppose Miranda’s gone to bed yet?”

“I’ll go see,” Patience offered, willing to postpone the inevitable for even those few moments longer.

“What do you want with Miranda?” Pauline asked.

“To do something for me.”

“Can’t I do it?”

“No—­and it must be done to-night.  Mother, what are you smiling over?”

“I thought it would be that way, dear.”

“Miranda’s coming,” Patience called.  “She’d just taken her back hair down, and she’s waiting to twist it up again.  She’s got awful funny back hair.”

“Patience!  Patience!” her mother said reprovingly.

“I mean, there’s such a little—­”

“Go up-stairs and get yourself ready for bed at once.”

Miranda was waiting in the spare room.  “You ain’t took sick, Hilary?”

Hilary shook her head.  “Please, Miranda, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, will you bring Pauline’s bed in here?”

“I guessed as much,” Miranda said, moving Hilary’s bed to one side.

“Hilary—­wouldn’t you truly rather have a room to yourself—­for a change?” Pauline asked.