‘Till when we are invisible,’ said Cynthia, always ready with her mockery to exaggerate any pretension of her mother’s.  ’We are so high in rank that our sovereign must give us her sanction before we can play a round game at your house.’

Cynthia enjoyed the idea of her own full-grown size and stately gait, as contrasted with that of a meek, half-fledged girl in the nursery; but Miss Browning was half puzzled and half affronted.

’I don’t understand it at all.  In my days girls went wherever it pleased people to ask them, without this farce of bursting out in all their new fine clothes at some public place.  I don’t mean but what the gentry took their daughters to York, or Matlock, or Bath to give them a taste of gay society when they were growing up; and the quality went up to London, and their young ladies were presented to Queen Charlotte, and went to a birthday ball, perhaps.  But for us little Hollingford people, why we knew every child amongst us from the day of its birth; and many a girl of twelve or fourteen have I seen go out to a card-party, and sit quiet at her work, and know how to behave as well as any lady there.  There was no talk of “coming out” in those days for any one under the daughter of a squire.’

’After Easter, Molly and I shall know how to behave at a card-party, but not before,’ said Cynthia, demurely.

‘You’re always fond of your quips and your cranks,’ my dear,’ said Miss Browning, ’and I wouldn’t quite answer for your behaviour:  you sometimes let your spirits carry you away.  But I’m quite sure Molly will be a little lady as she always is, and always was, and I have known her from a babe.’

Mrs. Gibson took up arms on behalf of her own daughter, or rather, she took up arms against Molly’s praises.

’I don’t think you would have called Molly a lady the other day, Miss Browning, if you had found her where I did:  sitting up in a cherry-tree, six feet from the ground at least, I do assure you.’

‘Oh! but that wasn’t pretty,’ said Miss Browning, shaking her head at Molly.  ‘I thought you’d left off those tomboy ways.’

‘She wants the refinement which good society gives in several ways’, said Mrs. Gibson, returning to the attack on poor Molly.  ’She’s very apt to come upstairs two steps at a time.’

‘Only two, Molly!’ said Cynthia.  ’Why, to-day I found I could manage four of these broad shallow steps.’

‘My dear child, what are you saying?’

’Only confessing that I, like Molly, want the refinements which good society gives; therefore, please do let us go to Miss Brownings’ this evening.  I will pledge myself for Molly that she shan’t sit in a cherry-tree; and Molly shall see that I don’t go upstairs in an unladylike way.  I will go upstairs as meekly as if I were a come-out young lady, and had been to the Easter ball.’

So it was agreed that they should go.  If Mr. Osborne Hamley had been named as one of the probable visitors, there would have been none of this difficulty about the affair.