with you. Perhaps I can keep the hornets off while you untie
her. What can I fight them with? Oh, look! This box cover will be just
the thing."

"I'm going, too," said Priscilla quietly. Claire uttered a stifled
shriek and caught her friend's arm protestingly. Priscilla shook her
off.

"Don't be silly," she said sharply. "Do let me alone, Claire. Now
where's that other box cover?" She snatched it up and ran in pursuit of
the intrepid pair advancing toward the animated scene under the
maple-tree.

"I really think we ought to get further away," said Ruth in alarm. "Oh,
hush, Dorothy!" For Dorothy who had felt the contagion of the general
excitement, and whose fears were complicated by a harrowing uncertainty
as to whether a hornet might not be distantly related to a bear, had
burst into noisy weeping.

The desirability of retreat had presented itself forcefully to the
others. Claire, in spite of her anxiety over Priscilla's fate, was not
averse to getting further away from the scene of the combat, and Aunt
Abigail was already hurrying toward the woods, with an agility which
discredited her claim to having long passed the prescribed three-score
years and ten.

"Aren't you coming, Amy?" Ruth cried, seizing the weeping Dorothy by the
hand. "What are you waiting for?" She turned her head, and for a moment
stood transfixed, as if astonishment had produced a temporary paralysis.

"Amy Lassell," she choked, "I--I think you're just heartless."

Instead of joining in the retreat, or lending aid to the attacking
party, Amy had snatched up her camera, and was bending over the finder
in an absorption which rendered her quite oblivious to Ruth's
denunciation. She was, indeed, excusable for thinking that the scene
under the maple would make a spirited and unusual photograph. Old Bess
was rearing and plunging with a coltish animation quite inconsistent
with the dignity of her twenty-three years. Priscilla and Peggy, armed
with the tin covers of the boxes which had contained the cake and
sandwiches, were striking wildly at the advance guard of the hornet
army. And Lucy, in her efforts to get at the halter, without coming in
contact with Bess's heels or being seriously stung, was dodging about in
a fashion calculated to awaken despair in the breast of a photographer.

"If only they would stand still a minute," groaned Amy, too absorbed in
her undertaking seriously to consider the consequences of a literal
fulfilment of her wish