selves if you talk one side of trees without looking on the other."

There was then only a few moments before Madame's musical Japanese
gong which announced the close of intermission should sound, but three
determined souls in conspiracy can accomplish much in a few moments. The
first move was planned in detail before that gong sounded, and the two
boys raced to the house, and Lily followed, carrying a toadstool, which
she had hurriedly caught up from the lawn for her object of nature to be
taken into class.

It was a poisonous toadstool, and Lily was quite a heroine in the class.
That fact doubtless gave her a more dauntless air when, after school,
the two boys caught up with her walking gracefully down the road,
flirting her skirts and now and then giving her head a toss, which made
her fluff of hair fly into a golden foam under her daisy-trimmed straw
hat.

"To-night," Johnny whispered, as he sped past.

"At half past nine, between your house and the Simmonses'," replied
Lily, without even looking at him. She was a past-mistress of
dissimulation.

Lily's mother had guests at dinner that night, and the guests remarked
sometimes, within the little girl's hearing, what a darling she was.

"She never gives me a second's anxiety," Lily's mother whispered to a
lady beside her. "You cannot imagine what a perfectly good, dependable
child she is."

"Now my Christina is a good child in the grain," said the lady, "but she
is full of mischief. I never can tell what Christina will do next."

"I can always tell," said Lily's mother, in a voice of maternal triumph.

"Now only the other night, when I thought Christina was in bed, that
absurd child got up and dressed and ran over to see her aunt Bella. Tom
came home with her, and of course there was nothing very bad about it.
Christina was very bright; she said, 'Mother, you never told me I must
not get up and go to see Aunt Bella,' which was, of course, true. I
could not gainsay that."

"I cannot," said Lily's mother, "imagine my Lily's doing such a thing."

If Lily had heard that last speech of her mother's, whom she dearly
loved, she might have wavered. That pathetic trust in herself might have
caused her to justify it. But she had finished her dinner and had been
excused, and was undressing for bed, with the firm determination to rise
betimes and dress and join Johnny Trumbull and Arnold Carruth. Johnny
had the easiest time of them all. He simply had to bid his aunt J