A Flock of Girls and Boys | Page 4

knew how it
would be received; he knew that the three would laugh at him and say,
"What does a boy know about girl's clothes?"
In the mean time, while all this was going on, what was that girl who
had suggested the talk, that girl who sat at the corner table in the dining
room and who was now lying in a hammock,--what was she doing,
what was she thinking?
CHAPTER II.

She was lying looking up through the green branches of the trees. She
had been reading, but her book was now closed, and she was lying
quietly looking up at the blue sky between the branches. Her thoughts
were not quite so quiet as her position would seem to indicate. She had,
as Will Wentworth had said, heard all that talk about the Pelhams.
Whatever her class in life, she was certainly a delicate and honorable
young girl; for at the very first, when she found that it was a talk
between a party of friends, and they were unconscious of a stranger's
near neighborhood, she had done her best to make her presence known
to them by various little coughs and ahems, and once or twice by
decided movements, and readjustments of her position. As no attention
was paid to these demonstrations, she finally concluded that none of the
party cared whether they were overheard or not, and so settled herself
comfortably back again into her place, and opened her book.
But she could not read much. These talkers were all about her own age,
and if they did not care that a stranger was overhearing what they said,
she need not trouble herself any more; and it was quite certain she
found the talk amusing, for more than once a ripple of merriment
would dimple her face, and the laughter would nearly break forth from
her lips. Even at the last, when Agnes spoke so scornfully of the little
yellow dog, the girl seemed to be more amused than annoyed; and she
quite understood Miss Agnes's unfinished sentence, too, and Dora's
little device to make it unfinished.
It was then only that she saw that her attempts to inform the party of
her near neighborhood had been unsuccessful. She got rather red as this
knowledge was forced upon her; then, like Will Wentworth, she
burrowed down deeper than ever in the hammock, and gave way to a
little burst of laughter, though, unlike Will's, hers was no noisy
explosion.
All the time she was watching Will and the girls as they took their way
across the lawn; and as soon as they disappeared from her view, she
jumped from the hammock, and with the fleetest of fleet footsteps ran
into the house. Coming down the long wide hall, she met the very
person she was going in search of,--the person that Dora Robson had

called "that stuffy old woman;" and trotting after her was the little
yellow dog, who had just been washed and brushed until his short hair
shone like satin.
"Oh, Pete, Pete, come here!" and Pete at this invitation flew to his
young mistress's arms with much demonstration of delight.
"And they called you a vulgar plebeian dog, Pete, just think of that!"
cried the girl, as she fondled the little animal.
"Who called him that, Peggy?" asked her companion, in a surprised
tone.
"One of those girls at the table by the window. Oh, auntie, I want to tell
you about it. I was coming to find you on purpose to tell you. Let's go
in here, where we shall be all by ourselves," turning towards a small
unoccupied reception-room.
There, cosily ensconced beside her aunt, with the little yellow dog at
her feet, the dog's mistress told her story, with various exclamations
and interjections of, "Now wasn't it horrid of them?" and "Did you ever
know anything so ridiculous?" while auntie listened with great interest,
her only comment at the end being,--
"Well, they're not worth minding, Peggy, and I wouldn't act as if I'd
heard what they said when you meet them. I wouldn't take any notice of
them."
"I? Why, it's they who won't take any notice of me, auntie. I'm like my
little dog,--a vulgar plebeian. What would they say, what would they
think, if they could hear you call me Peggy?--that's as bad as Pete, isn't
it?"
"I'm afraid it is;" and auntie laughed a little as she spoke.
The great summer hotel was not nearly full yet, for it was only the last
of June; and as Peggy went down to luncheon, her hand closely clasped
in "auntie's," whom should she meet face to face in the rather

deserted-looking hall but "those girls"? It was a little embarrassing all
round, and they all colored up very rosily as