n't she and the stuffy old woman, as you call her, know the
Pelhams? She's a nice-looking girl, a first-rate looking girl. What's
the matter with her?"

"Matter? I don't know that anything is the matter, except that she
doesn't look like the sort of girl who would be an acquaintance of the
Pelhams. She doesn't look like their kind, you know. She wears the
plainest sort of dresses,--just little straight up and down frocks of
brown or drab, or those white cambric things,--they are more like
baby-slips than anything; and her hats are just the same,--great flat
all-round hats, not a bit of style to them; and she's a girl of fourteen
or fifteen certainly. Do you suppose people of the Pelhams' kind dress
like that?"

Will gave a gruff little sound half under his breath, as he asked
sarcastically,--

"How do people of the Pelham kind dress?"

"Oh, like Dora and Amy, and especially like Agnes,--in the height of the
fashion, you know," Tilly cried laughingly.

"Now, Tilly," expostulated Dora, "neither Amy nor I overdress. We wear
what all girls of our age--girls who are almost young ladies--wear, and
I'm sure you wear the same kind of things."

"Not quite, Dora. I'll own, though, I would if I could; but there's such
a lot of us at home that the money gives out before it goes all 'round,"
said Tilly, frankly, yet rather ruefully.

"I'm sure you look very nice," said Dora, politely. Amy echoed the
polite remark, while Will, eying the three with an attempt at a critical
estimate, thought to himself, "They don't look a bit nicer than that
girl at the corner table."

But Will was too wise to give utterance to this thought. He 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;