, to peer in. "Old black silk is giving it to her. Oh, I
just hate Miss Anstice!"

"Sarah, why couldn't you have kept still?" cried another girl. "If you
hadn't spoken, Miss Anstice would have gotten over it."

"Well, I wasn't going to have Polly Pepper blamed," said Sarah sturdily.
"If you were willing to, I wasn't going to stand still and hear it, when
it was our fault she told us first."

"Oh, no, Sarah," said Polly, "it surely was my own self that was to
blame. I ought to have run in and told Miss Salisbury first. Well, now,
girls, what shall I do? I've lost that picnic for you all, for I don't
believe she will let us have it now."

"No, she won't," cried Leslie tragically; "of that you may be sure,
Polly Pepper."

VIII "WE'RE TO HAVE OUR PICNIC!"

And that afternoon Polly kept back bad recollections of the gloomy
morning at school as well as she could. She didn't let Alexia get the
least bit of a hint about it, although how she ever escaped letting her
find it out, she never could quite tell, but rattled on, all the
messages the girls had sent, and every bit of school news she could
think of.

"Were the other girls who went to Silvia's, at school?" asked Alexia
suddenly, and twitching up her pillow to get higher in bed, for Dr.
Fisher had said she mustn't get up this first day; and a hard piece of
work Mother Fisher had had to keep the aunt out of the room.

"I wouldn't go in," Mamsie would say; "Dr. Fisher doesn't wish her to be
disturbed. To-morrow, Miss Rhys." And it was all done so quietly that
Alexia's aunt would find herself off down in the library again and busy
with a book, very much to her own surprise.

"I'll shake 'em up," Polly cried; and hopping off from the foot of the
bed, she thumped the pillows, if not with a merry, at least with a
vigorous hand. "There now," crowding them in back of Alexia's restless
head, "isn't that fine?"

"I should think it was," exclaimed Alexia with a sigh of satisfaction,
and giving her long figure a contented stretch; "you do know just the
best things to do, Polly Pepper. Well, tell on. I suppose Amy Garrett is
perfectly delighted to cut that old art lecture."

"Oh, Professor Mills didn't come at all," said Polly. That brought it
all back about Miss Anstice, and her head drooped suddenly.

"Didn't come? oh dear!" And Alexia fell to laughing so, that she didn't
notice Polly's face at all. But her aunt popping in, she became sober at
once, and ran her