again and make it up, so that I can. But it never can be possible that
triangles should be as interesting as human beings, Peggy."

"A great deal more interesting," Peggy maintained, "when the human
beings are dead and buried hundreds of years."

"One word more, and I have done," said poor Margaret. "You used an
expression, dear,--old fuddy-duddies, was it? I never heard it before.
Do you think it is an elegant expression, Peggy dear?"

"It's as good as I am girl!" said Peggy; and Margaret shut her eyes, and
felt despair in her heart. But soon she felt a warm kiss on her
forehead, and Peggy was promising to be good, and to try harder, and
even to do her best to learn the difference between the two
Harolds,--Hardrada and Godwinsson.

And if she would promise to do that, might she just climb up now and see
what that nest was, out on the fork there?

Perhaps Rita would come down soon, with her guitar or her
embroidery-frame; and they would sing and chatter till the early dinner.
Rita's songs were all of love and war, boleros and bull-fights. She sang
them with flashing ardour, and the other girls heard with breathless
delight, watching the play of colour and feeling, that made her face a
living transcript of what she sang. But when she was tired, she would
hand the guitar to Margaret, and beg her to sing "something cool,
peaceful, sea-green, like yourself, Marguerite!"

"Am I sea-green?" asked Margaret.

"Ah! cherub! you understand me! My blood is in a fever with these songs
of Cuba. I want coolness, icy caves, pine-trees in the wind!"

So Margaret would take the guitar, and sing in her calm, smooth
contralto the songs her father used to love: songs of the North, that
had indeed the sound of the sea and the wind in them.

"It was all for our rightful king
That we left fair Scotland's strand.
It was all for our rightful king,
We ever saw Irish land,
My dear,
We ever saw Irish land!"

The plaintive melody rose and fell like the waves on the shore; and Rita
would curl herself like a panther in the sun, and murmur with pleasure,
and call for more. Then, perhaps, Margaret would sing that lovely ballad
of Hogg's, which begins,

"Far down by yon hills of the heather sae green,
And down by the corrie that sings to the sea,
The bonnie young Flora sat sighing her lane,
The dew on her plaid and the tear in her e'e.

"She looked on a boat with the breezes that