“Then, I suppose we must not use these wooden ones, my fanciful fairy?”

“Don’t be so foolish, Lola!” snapped in Miss Prosody.  “You’ll spoil your frock; throw them away!”

“We can put them over the platters,” said Cecil.  “Hand out the edibles, Bluebell.  What have you got?”

“Here’s a pie, a cake, a tart, croquettes; no knives, about a pound of salt, and some butter in the last stage of dissolution.”

“No knives!” cried Miss Prosody.  “There must be!” plunging desperately into the basket.

“That is more untidy than a lily-leaf plate,” remarked Lilla.

“No, positively not,” said the governess.  “How very remiss of Bowers, particularly as I observe he has provided forks!”

The children looked disappointed.  They had been reckoning on the phenomenon of Miss Prosody, subjugated by hunger, eating pie with her fingers.

“Here be a knife!” said the boatman, wiping on his trousers the blade of his clasp-knife.

“Let as put a polish on,” said Lilla, laughing at Cecil’s face; and, jumping on to the bank, thrust it several times into the earth.  The children, tired of their cramped position in the boat, wished to dine on shore; but it was thickly wooded, and there was no clear space; so Freddy was wedged into a fork of the tree, and Lola swung on another bough, where they chattered like two pies, handing down a basket on a string when they required fresh supplies.

Cecil lay on the bear-skin in her canoe, with her hat over her face, declaring it too hot to eat, but consuming, under protest, a croquette occasionally tossed in for her sustenance.  Miss Prosody, quite genial and urbane after luncheon, was deep in consultation with the boatman as to the locality of certain ferns she proposed spudding up for her pet rockery at “The Maples,” where her lighter hours were diurnally spent in washing and tending her spoils.

“I suppose this is all very sylvan and jolly,” said Lilla, handing the remnants of the refection to the boatman; “yet somehow, candidly, it’s slow.”

“Possibly,” said Cecil, “it is the absence of the other sex that makes you find it so?”

“Perhaps,” said Lilla, frankly, with furtive enjoyment of Miss Prosody’s stiffening face.  “Well, ladies, I should like my little smoke; can I offer anybody one?  You will find them very mild,”—­and she drew forth a neat case of Latakia cigarettes, selected one, and, striking a match on the heel of her boot, lit it.

“Of course, if you choose to be so unlady-like, we cannot prevent you,” said the governess, icily.

“Dear me!” said Lilla, innocently, “I never dreamt of your objecting; for I have heard you tell Colonel Rolleston, when he has been smoking, how fond you were of it in the open air.”

“Colonel Rolleston would most decidedly disapprove of your doing it.”

“He does, I believe, of most of my actions; but he is very kind to me all the same.  Look at this wretch of a mosquito actually stinging through my glove.  I’ll just touch him up with the red ash of my cigar.”