n engulfing armchair with a sigh of satisfaction, her eyes
following Miss Blake from place to place as she tripped briskly about,
energetically wielding her dust cloth and whisk broom and humming
contentedly as she worked.

"Perhaps you won't approve of the plan that I've got in my mind, and
won't let Nan go into it," ventured Ruth, presently.

"I can't fancy you suggesting anything that I would so seriously
disapprove of as that," returned Miss Blake, smiling kindly, but asking
for no further enlightenment on the subject than her guest was inclined
to give of her own accord.

"Well, then, it's this: If the cold weather lasts we'll have elegant
sleighing, with all this snow, and I want to hire a sleigh, just any
common old thing will do, and fill it with straw, and all of us girls
and boys go off on a screamingly fine sleigh-ride. If it clears we'll
have a full moon, and I think it would just be the jolliest thing in
the world. Now please say Nan can go. She'll love to I know, and she
always makes things snap so," pleaded the girl, fixing her eyes on Miss
Blake's face with a peculiar intensity of expression.

The governess hesitated.

"Oh, please say she can," reiterated Ruth.

"My dear Ruth, I can't say anything until I know more of the matter.
You say you girls and boys are to go. What girls and boys do you mean?"

"Why, Lu and Grace and Mary and the Buckstone girls, of course; and
John Gardiner and Harley Morris and Everett Webster, and oh! all those
fellows--the ones in our set; you've met them all."

"And is there to be no grown woman in the party--no chaperone?"
suggested Miss Blake.

Ruth looked down and began picking a thread from the thumb of her glove.

"Oh, of course; mamma wouldn't let me go unless there was a chaperone,"
she replied after a moment, but tamely, with the ring all faded out of
her voice.

"No, I am sure she would not," the governess remarked dryly.

"I thought of you at once," Ruth began again with an upward glance that
however did not meet Miss Blake's eye. "But then we all thought that
it would be too much to ask of you--to ride all those miles with a
noisy crowd in the cold and night, and--so on, and so--so--just before
I came here I ran into Mrs. Cole and asked her to chaperone us, and she
said she would."

The governess laid her duster on a chair, and unbuttoned her apron very
deliberately.

"Mrs. Cole," she repeated half-aloud, as if speaking to herself, and
her to