little
eager face.

"Yes, sir, she is. She wants us to dance!"

"She _does!_"

"Yes, sir, she does. She wanted us to learn the steps, right down in her
garden this afternoon. Would you dance, Mr. Goodhue?"

"Would I? Perhaps I might, were I as little and spry as you, and Winnie
would teach me steps, and it was down in the garden."

The little girls looked up into his face searchingly. He walked on
laughing, and they went on homeward, to ask further advice.

At home, too, everyone seemed to think it a matter for smiles, and
laughed at the two tender little consciences.

So they both ran back after dinner to Mrs. Tennyson's. But on the way
Kathie said, "They let us, the minister and ev'ry body, but if it is
wicked _ever_, how isn't it wicked _now_?"

"I s'pose 'cause we're children," Lu said wisely.

The logical trouble thus laid, they tripped on.

They were dressed in sweet pink, and their sun-bonnets were as fresh and
crisp as only the sun-bonnets of dear little country school-girls ever
can be. It was a most merry summer day; all nature moving gladsomely to
the full music of life. The leaves were fluttering to each other, the
grasses sweeping up and down, the bobolinks hopping by the meadow path.

Their friend Winnie came out to meet them, looking rather astonished.

"We're going to learn," shouted Lu, "get on your bonnet."

"But you wasn't good to me to-day," said Winnie, thoughtfully.

"We didn't da'st to be," said Kathie, "till we'd asked somebody that
knew."

Mrs. Tennyson was half of the mind to call her little daughter in; yet
she felt it a pity to be less sweet and forgiving than the child.

Winnie already had her class before her. "Now you must do just as I do.
You must hold your dress back so,--not grab it, but hold it back nice,
and you must bend forward so, and you must point your slippers so,--not
stand flat."

Very graceful the little dancing-teacher looked, tip-toeing here,
gliding there, twinkling through a series of pretty steps down the long
garden walk.

But the pupils! Do the best she might, sturdy little Kathie couldn't
manage her dress. She grasped it tightly in either fat little fist.
"Mother Bunch!" Lu giggled behind her back.

Kathie's face got very red over that. It was well enough to be
"Dumpling,"--everybody loves a dumpling; but "Mother Bunch!" So she
bounced and shuffled a little longer, and then she said she was going
home.

But Miss Lu wasn't ready. She greatly