equally old-fashioned
piece of priceless lace that adorns Miss Penelope's throat.

"Well, I can't think how they do it!" she says, lost in admiration of a
little slim hair lady bending over a miniature hair urn in the most
lachrymose attitude conceivable. "But they have put her eye in wrongly:
she looks as if she is dying with laughter."

Here Miss Priscilla edges in her question, as to how they have contrived
to be at Moyne at so early an hour.

"We came by the wrong train," says Terry. "We generally do. Ever since
we left the South of France--where we were staying with the Bohuns, you
know, on our way here--we have been missing our trains right and left,
and turning up at all sorts of unexpected places. Haven't we, Kit?"

"_You_ have," says Kit, with suspicious emphasis. "You have such a
pretty trick of rushing into the first train you see, without ever
asking any one where it is going. No wonder we always turned up at the
wrong end."

"_You've_ a pretty trick of putting everything down on other people's
shoulders," says Terence, with open disgust. "Whose fault was it we were
always so late at the stations that we hadn't time to make inquiries,
I'd like to know? Could you," with fine irony, "tell us?"

"Certainly; it was nurse," replies Kit, with dignity.

"Dear me! and where is your nurse now?" asks Miss Priscilla, anxiously.
The query is a fortunate one, in that it turns the conversation into a
different channel, and checks the eloquence of Kit and Terry, who are
plainly on the brink of an open war.

"When last _I_ saw her," says Terence, "she was sitting on the top of
our biggest box, with everything else strewn around her, and her feet
resting on two brown-paper parcels.--I wonder," says Mr. Beresford,
addressing Monica, "what on earth she had in those brown paper parcels.
She has been hugging them night and day ever since she left Jerusalem."

"Dynamite," suggested Monica, lightly; whereupon the two Misses Blake
turn pale.

"At that rate, Aunt Priscilla, we needn't trouble about her," says
Terence, pleasantly, "as she _must_ be blown up by this. None of those
clock-work affairs could be arranged to go on much longer. Poor thing!
when in the flesh she wasn't half bad. I forgive her everything,--even
her undying hatred to myself."

"If she is in fragments, so are our things," says Kit. "I think she
_needn't_ have elected to sit on them at the supreme moment."

"You don't really think," says Miss Penel