er are tumpany!"

"And what is company?" I asked, rather anxious to know from what new
point we were to be regarded.

"Tumpany is people that comes to stay in the pink room wif trunks, and
we play wif them and make them do somfing to amuse 'em all the time
hard, and give 'em nicer things than we have to eat, and father shaves
too much and tuts him and wears his little dinky coat to dinner. And by
and by when they've gone away Ann-stasia says, 'Glory be!' and muvver
goes to sleep. But muvver, if you are the tumpany, you can't go to sleep
when you've gone away, can you?"

A voice joined me in laughter, Maria Maxwell's, from inside the open
window of the dining room. Looking toward the sound, I saw that, though
the dining table itself had been cleared, a side table drawn close to
the window was set with places for two, a posy of poets' narcissus and
the last lilies-of-the-valley between, while a folded napkin at one
place rested on a newspaper!

"I thought we were to get our own breakfasts," I said, in a tone of very
feeble expostulation, which plainly told that, at that particular
moment, it was the last thing I wished to do.

"You are, the very minute you feel like it, and not before! You must let
yourselves down gradually, and not bolt out of the house as if you had
been evicted. If Bart went paperless and letterless this very first
morning, until he has met something that interests him more, he would
think about the lack of the news and the mail all day until they became
more than usually important!" So saying, Maria swept the stems and
litter of the flowers she had been arranging into her apron, and
annexing the Infant to one capable finger, all the other nine being
occupied, she went down the path toward the garden for fresh supplies,
leaving Ann-stasia, as the Infant calls her, to serve the coffee, a
prerogative of which she would not consent to be bereft, not even upon
the plea of lightening her labours!

"Isn't this perfect!" I exclaimed, looking toward a gap in the hills
that was framed by the debatable knoll on one side and reached by a
short cut across the old orchard and abandoned meadows of the farm
above, the lack of cultivation resulting in a wealth of field flowers.

"Entirely!" assented Bart, his spoon in the coffee cup stirring
vigorously and his head enveloped in the newspaper. But what did the
point of view matter: he was content and unhurried--what better
beginning for a vacation? In fact in t