two girls came up, one carrying the
bonnet and the other the shawl, but nobody seemed to think it necessary
to introduce Elise's little friend to the other guests. It would have
been an embarrassing ordeal for her, for there were so many strangers.
Mary recognized the two young lieutenants.

With the help of a pretty brunette in white, whom Elise whispered was
Miss Bonham from Lexington, they were rigging up some kind of a coat of
mail for Lieutenant Logan to wear in one of the tableaux. Ranald, with a
huge sheet of cardboard and the library shears, was manufacturing a pair
of giant scissors, half as long as himself, which a blonde in blue was
waiting to cover with tin foil. She was singing coon songs while she
waited, to the accompaniment of a mandolin, and in such a gay,
rollicking way, that every one was keeping time either with hand or
foot.

"That is Miss Bernice Howe," answered Elise, in response to Mary's
whispered question. "She lives here in the Valley. And that's Malcolm
MacIntyre, my cousin, who is sitting beside her. That's his brother
Keith helping Aunt Allison with the programme cards."

Mary stared at the two young men, vaguely disappointed. They were the
two little knights of Kentucky, but they were grown up, like all the
other heroes and heroines she had looked forward to meeting. She told
herself that she might have expected it, for she knew that Malcolm was
Joyce's age; but she had associated them so long with the handsome
little fellows in the photograph Lloyd had, clad in the knightly
costumes of King Arthur's time, that it was hard to recognize them now,
in these up-to-date, American college boys, who had long ago discarded
their knightly disguises.

"And that," said Elise, as another young man came out of the house with
a sheet of music in his hand for Miss Howe, "is Mister Alex Shelby. He
lives in Louisville, but he comes out to the Valley all the time to see
Bernice. I'll tell you about them while we drive over to Mrs. Bisbee's.

"It's this way," she began a few moments later, as they rattled down the
road; "Bernice asked Allison if Mister Shelby couldn't be in one of the
tableaux. Allison said yes, that they had intended to ask him before she
spoke of it; that they had decided to ask him to be the boatman in the
tableau of 'Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat.' But when Bernice found
that Lloyd had already been asked to be Elaine, she was furious. She
said she was just as good as engaged to