in.

"Hugh's down at Dr. Jordan's and he won't be home till dinner
time," replied Rosemary. "Mother would want us to be nice to Aunt
Trudy, you know she would."

"Well, I'm going to be nice," insisted Sarah, scrambling to her feet
and hurling the book under the swing where she kept the larger part
of her dilapidated library. "I'll go to the station if I can go as I
am--I have to clean the rabbit hutch when I get back and I won't
have time to be dressing and undressing all the afternoon."

"You can't go as you are!" Rosemary surveyed her sister
appraisingly. "Your face is black and your dress has a grease
spot across the front. And you haven't any hair ribbon."

"I'll go as I am, or I won't go at all," repeated Sarah coolly.

Rosemary stabbed her long needles into her half-finished sweater and
hung her knitting bag on the back of her chair.

"Then you can stay home," she said crossly. "I'll go up and get
Shirley now and we'll go without you."

She ran upstairs, coaxed the protesting Shirley from her play of
sailing boats in the bath-tub, and was buttoning her into a clean
frock when Sarah came tramping through the hall. She occupied a
room with Shirley, while Rosemary had a room to herself connected
with the younger girls' room by a rather narrow door.

"Wait a minute and I'll go," said Sarah, jerking down her tan linen
dress from its hook in the closet.

"Is Aunt Trudy's room all ready, Winnie?" asked Rosemary, as the
three sisters stopped in the kitchen to notify that faithful
individual of their departure. "Do we look nice?"

It was impossible to look at the three faces without an answering
smile. Rosemary glowed, pink-cheeked, star-eyed, in a frock of dull
blue linen made with wide white pique collar and cuffs. Her hair
waved and rippled and curled, despite its loose braiding, almost to
her waist. Rosemary was simply going to the station to meet the 4:10
train, but nothing was ever casual to her; she met each hour
expectantly on tip-toe and, as her mother had once observed, laughed
and wept her way around the clock. Sarah smiled broadly--going to
the station to meet Aunt Trudy had, for some inexplicable reason,
resolved itself into a joke for her. Sarah was not excited and she
represented solid common-sense from her straight Dutch-cut hair to
her square-toed sandals, for no amount of argument from Rosemary
could induce her to put on her best patent leather slippers. And
Shirley--well Winnie picked up Shi