“Isn’t your grandmamma afraid to let you run up and down here, Miss Gladwyn?” I said.

“Me!” she exclaimed, apparently in the utmost surprise.  “That would be fun!  For, you know, if she tried to hinder me—­but she knows it’s no use; I taught her that long ago—­let me see, how long:  oh!  I don’t know—­I should think it must be ten years at least.  I ran away, and they thought I had drowned myself in the pond.  And I saw them, all the time, poking with a long stick in the pond, which, if I had been drowned there, never could have brought me up, for it is a hundred feet deep, I am sure.  How I hurt my sides trying to keep from screaming with laughter!  I fancied I heard one say to the other, ‘We must wait till she swells and floats?’”

“Dear me! what a peculiar child!” I said to myself.

And yet somehow, whatever she said—­even when she was most rude to her grandmother—­she was never offensive.  No one could have helped feeling all the time that she was a little lady.—­I thought I would venture a question with her.  I stood still at a turn of the zigzag, and looked down into the hollow, still a good way below us, where I could now distinguish the form, on the opposite side of the pond, of a woman seated at the foot of a tree, and stooping forward over a book.

“May I ask you a question, Miss Gladwyn?”

“Yes, twenty, if you like; but I won’t answer one of them till you give up calling me Miss Gladwyn.  We can’t be friends, you know, so long as you do that.”

“What am I to call you, then?  I never heard you called by any other name than Pet, and that would hardly do, would it?”

“Oh, just fancy if you called me Pet before grannie!  That’s grannie’s name for me, and nobody dares to use it but grannie—­not even auntie; for, between you and me, auntie is afraid of grannie; I can’t think why.  I never was afraid of anybody—­except, yes, a little afraid of old Sarah.  She used to be my nurse, you know; and grandmamma and everybody is afraid of her, and that’s just why I never do one thing she wants me to do.  It would never do to give in to being afraid of her, you know.—­There’s auntie, you see, down there, just where I told you before.”

“Oh yes!  I see her now.—­What does your aunt call you, then?”

“Why, what you must call me—­my own name, of course.”

“What is that?”

“Judy.”

She said it in a tone which seemed to indicate surprise that I should not know her name—­perhaps read it off her face, as one ought to know a flower’s name by looking at it.  But she added instantly, glancing up in my face most comically—­

“I wish yours was Punch.”

“Why, Judy?”

“It would be such fun, you know.”

“Well, it would be odd, I must confess.  What is your aunt’s name?”

“Oh, such a funny name!—­much funnier than Judy:  Ethelwyn.  It sounds as if it ought to mean something, doesn’t it?”