“Doing their own work, indeed!” laughed Julia.  “My good lady, you forget Carrie.  Carrie comes in every night to do the dishes, and because she’s coloured, my Aunt May has always felt that she stole sugar and tea.  However, we all laughed at Aunt May this year, when it came to suspecting Carrie of stealing Regina’s face powder!  No, but you’re quite right, Bab,” she went on more seriously.  “It’s all very strange and dramatic.  Saturday, when the Duchess came in to welcome us, and flowers came from all sides, and the Penniscots came to carry us off to dinner, I really felt, ’Lawk a mussy on me, this can’t be I!’”

“Well, then, where is the pill in the jelly?” asked Barbara solicitously.

Julia had flung back her head and was listening intently.  Footsteps and voices were unmistakably coming up the hall stairs.

“No pills—­all jelly!” she had time to say smilingly, before the door opened and three persons came into the room:  Doctor Studdiford, handsomer and more boyishly radiant than ever; Miss Toland, quite gray, but erect and vigorous still; and little Anna, a splendid, glowing ten-year-old, in the blue serge sailor suit and round straw hat made popular by the little English princess.

Babel followed.  Every one must kiss Barbara; little George must come in for his full share of attention.  Presently the beaming Ellie was summoned, and the children went away with her; Barbara carried off her aunt for a makeshift luncheon in the dismantled Curriel mansion, and the Studdifords were left alone.

“We picked Aunt Sanna up at the corner,” said Jim, one arm about his wife as they stood in the window looking down at the departing visitors, “and of course Anna must drag her along with us to see the baby lion!  I stopped at Lord Essels’s, by the way, and it’s a perfect knit—­can’t tell where one bone stops and the other begins!”

“Oh, Jimmy, you old miracle worker!  Aren’t you pleased?”

“Well, rath-er!  And young Lady Essels wants to call on you, Ju; says you were the loveliest thing at the New Year’s ball last year!  Remember when we rushed home to feed Georgie, and rushed back again?”

“Oh, perfectly.  I hope she will come; she looked sweet.  And every one’s coming to our Tuesday dinner, Jim, except Ivy; notes from them all.  Ivy says Lady Violet is so ill that she can’t promise, but Phyllis is coming with the new husband.  She wrote such a cunning note!  And—­I’ll see Ivy this afternoon, and I think I’ll tell her that I’m going to leave her place open; if she can’t come, why we’ll just have to have a man over, that’s all!  It won’t be awfully formal anyway, Jimmy, at this time of the year!”

“Whatever you say, old lady!” Jim was thinking of something else.  “How do you feel about leaving the kids and going off for a little run with the Parkes to-morrow night?” he asked.  “He’s found some new place in which he wants us to dine and sleep.  Home the next morning.”