asked Barbara, sitting down on the
hearth in the brown room, before the embers, and throwing the nuts she
had picked up about the carpet into the coals.

We had carried the supper-dishes away into the out-room, and set them
on a great spare table that we kept there. "The room is as good as the
girl," said Barbara. It _is_ a comfort to put by things, with a clear
conscience, to a more rested time. We should let them be over the
Sunday; Monday morning would be all china and soapsuds; then there
would be a nice, freshly arrayed dresser, from top to bottom, and we
should have had both a party and a piece of fall cleaning.

"How do you feel about it?"

"I feel as if we had had a real _own_ party, ourselves," said Ruth;
"not as if 'the girls' had come and had a party here. There wasn't
anybody to _show us how_!"

"Except Miss Pennington. And wasn't it bewitchinating of her to come?
Nobody can say now--"

"What do you say it for, then?" interrupted Rosamond. "It was very
nice of Miss Pennington, and kind, considering it was a young party.
Otherwise, why shouldn't she?"

CHAPTER IX.

WINTER NIGHTS AND WINTER DAYS.

"That was a nice party," said Miss Pennington, walking home with
Leslie and Doctor John Hautayne, behind the Inglesides. "What made it
so nice?"

"You, very much," said Leslie, straightforwardly.

"I didn't begin it," said Miss Elizabeth. "No; that wasn't it. It was
a step out, somehow Out of the treadmill. I got tired of parties long
ago, before I was old. They were all alike. The only difference was
that in one house the staircase went up on the right side of the hall,
and in another on the left,--now and then, perhaps, at the back; and
when you came down again, the lady near the drawing-room door might be
Mrs. Hendee one night and Mrs. Marchbanks another; but after that it
was all the same. And O, how I did get to hate ice-cream!"

"This was a party of 'nexts,'" said Leslie, "instead of a selfsame."

"What a good time Miss Waters had--quietly! You could see it in her
face. A pretty face!" Miss Elizabeth spoke in a lower tone, for
Lucilla was just before the Inglesides, with Helen and Pen Pennington.
"She works too hard, though. I wish she came out more."

"The 'nexts' have to get tired of books and mending-baskets, while the
firsts are getting tired of ice-creams," replied Leslie. "Dear Miss
Pennington, there are ever so many nexts, and people don't think
anything about it!"

"So there a