whistled, she sang at the top of her voice, and plunged about the house in her thick boots, till she could be off to join the two boys at the rectory, her dear friends and comrades.  Robin Wingfield, the elder, was her junior by rather more than a year; and this advantage, especially as she was tall and strong for her age, enabled her fully to hold her own with them.  Nor could Mrs. Blake hinder this friendship, as she would gladly have done, for her husband was on Lottie’s side.

“Let the girl alone,” he said.  “Too big for this sort of thing?  Rubbish!  The milliner’s bills will come in quite soon enough.  And what’s amiss with Robin and Jack?  Good boys as boys go, and she’s another; and if they like to scramble over hedges and ditches together, let them.  For Heaven’s sake, Caroline, don’t attempt to keep her at home:  she’ll certainly drive me crazy if you do.  No one ever banged doors as Lottie does:  she ought to patent the process.  Slams them with a crash which jars the whole house, and yet manages not to latch them, and the moment she is gone they are swinging backward and forward till I’m almost out of my senses.  Here she comes down stairs, like a thunderbolt.—­Lottie, my dear girl, I’m sure it’s going to be fine:  better run out and look up those Wingfield boys, I think.”

So the trio spent long half-holidays rambling in the fields; and on these occasions Lottie might be met, an immense distance from home, in the shabbiest clothes and wearing a red cap of Robin’s tossed carelessly on her dark hair.  Percival once encountered them on one of these expeditions.  Lottie’s beauty was still pale and unripe, like those sheathed buds which will come suddenly to their glory of blossom, not like rosebuds which have a loveliness of their own; but the young man was struck by the boyish mixture of shyness and bluntness with which she greeted him, and attracted by the great eyes which gazed at him from under Robin’s shabby cap.  When he and Horace went to the Blakes’ he amused himself idly enough with the school-girl, while his cousin flirted with Addie.  He laughed one day when Mrs. Blake was unusually troubled about Lottie’s apparel, and said something about “a sweet neglect.”  But the soul of Lottie’s mamma was not to be comforted with scraps of poetry.  How could it be, when she had just arraigned her daughter on the charge of having her pockets bulging hideously, and had discovered that those receptacles overflowed with a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends, the accumulations of weeks, tending to show that Lottie and Cock Robin, as she called him, had all things in common?  How could it be, when Lottie was always outgrowing her garments in the most ungainly manner, so that her sleeves seemed to retreat in horror from her wrists and from her long hands, tanned by sun and wind, seamed with bramble-scratches and smeared with school-room ink?  Once Lottie came home with an unmistakable black eye, for which Robin’s cricket-ball was