During her stay at Mallowe in the summer, Lady Maria always gave a village treat.  She had given it for forty years, and it was a lively function.  Several hundred wildly joyous village children were fed to repletion with exhilarating buns and cake, and tea in mugs, after which they ran races for prizes, and were entertained in various ways, with the aid of such of the house-party as were benevolently inclined to make themselves useful.

Everybody was not so inclined, though people always thought the thing amusing.  Nobody objected to looking on, and some were agreeably stimulated by the general sense of festivity.  But Emily Fox-Seton was found by Lady Maria to be invaluable on this occasion.  It was so easy, without the least sense of ill-feeling, to give her all the drudgery to do.  There was plenty of drudgery, though it did not present itself to Emily Fox-Seton in that light.  She no more realised that she was giving Lady Maria a good deal for her money, so to speak, than she realised that her ladyship, though an amusing and delightful, was an absolutely selfish and inconsiderate old woman.  So long as Emily Fox-Seton did not seem obviously tired, it would not have occurred to Lady Maria that she could be so; that, after all, her legs and arms were mere human flesh and blood, that her substantial feet were subject to the fatigue unending trudging to and fro induces.  Her ladyship was simply delighted that the preparations went so well, that she could turn to Emily for service and always find her ready.  Emily made lists and calculations, she worked out plans and made purchases.  She interviewed the village matrons who made the cake and buns, and boiled the tea in bags in a copper; she found the women who could be engaged to assist in cutting cake and bread-and-butter and helping to serve it; she ordered the putting up of tents and forms and tables; the innumerable things to be remembered she called to mind.

“Really, Emily,” said Lady Maria, “I don’t know how I have done this thing for forty years without you.  I must always have you at Mallowe for the treat.”

Emily was of the genial nature which rejoices upon even small occasions, and is invariably stimulated to pleasure by the festivities of others.  The festal atmosphere was a delight to her.  In her numberless errands to the village, the sight of the excitement in the faces of the children she passed on her way to this cottage and that filled her eyes with friendly glee and wreathed her face with smiles.  When she went into the cottage where the cake was being baked, children hovered about in groups and nudged each other, giggling.  They hung about, partly through thrilled interest, and partly because their joy made them eager to courtesy to her as she came out, the obeisance seeming to identify them even more closely with the coming treat.  They grinned and beamed rosily, and Emily smiled at them and nodded, uplifted by a pleasure almost as infantile as their own.  She was really enjoying herself so honestly that she did not realise how hard she worked during the days before the festivity.  She was really ingenious, and invented a number of new methods of entertainment.  It was she who, with the aid of a couple of gardeners, transformed the tents into bowers of green boughs and arranged the decorations of the tables and the park gates.