ave invited us."

"Isn't it a lot of trouble to take for getting admittance to a garden
party?"

"To a garden party, yes; to _the_ garden party of the season, certainly
not. Every one of any consequence in the county, with the exception of
ourselves, has been asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far more
troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren't there than to get
in by a roundabout way. I stopped Mrs. Cuvering in the road yesterday
and talked very pointedly about the Princess. If she didn't choose to
take the hint and send me an invitation it's not my fault, is it? Here
we are: we just cut across the grass and through that little gate into
the garden."

Mrs. Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for a county garden party
function with an infusion of Almanack de Gotha, sailed through the narrow
grass paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the air of state
barges making an unofficial progress along a rural trout stream. There
was a certain amount of furtive haste mingled with the stateliness of
their advance, as though hostile search-lights might be turned on them at
any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not unobserved. Matilda
Cuvering, with the alert eyes of thirteen years old and the added
advantage of an exalted position in the branches of a medlar tree, had
enjoyed a good view of the Stossen flanking movement and had foreseen
exactly where it would break down in execution.

"They'll find the door locked, and they'll jolly well have to go back the
way they came," she remarked to herself. "Serves them right for not
coming in by the proper entrance. What a pity Tarquin Superbus isn't
loose in the paddock. After all, as every one else is enjoying
themselves, I don't see why Tarquin shouldn't have an afternoon out."

Matilda was of an age when thought is action; she slid down from the
branches of the medlar tree, and when she clambered back again Tarquin,
the huge white Yorkshire boar-pig, had exchanged the narrow limits of his
stye for the wider range of the grass paddock. The discomfited Stossen
expedition, returning in recriminatory but otherwise orderly retreat from
the unyielding obstacle of the locked door, came to a sudden halt at the
gate dividing the paddock from the gooseberry garden.

"What a villainous-looking animal," exclaimed Mrs. Stossen; "it wasn't
there when we came in."

"It's there now, anyhow," said her daughter. "What on earth are we to
d