ust among her abundant locks, lolls with half
her body in the air, and, by twisting her neck almost to dislocation,
manages to see round an ivy-grown buttress of the east wall, and to espy
people who are getting on their horses at the south doors of the
building.

"They are going out riding and I am shut up here!" she groans. "Oh, what
a while it takes one to grow up!"

"Who are going to ride?" asks Lilie, too fascinated by her drawing to
leave it.

"Lots of them," replies Dodo, who speaks four languages, and her own
worst of all. "All of them, pretty nearly. Mamma's on Pepper, and Lady
Waverley's got Bopeep,--she's always nervous, you know. I can't see very
much, 'cause of the ivy. Oh, there's the princess on Satan,--nobody else
could ride Satan; Lord Brandolin's put her up, and now he's riding by
her. They're gone now,--and papa's stopping behind them all to do
something to Bopeep's girths." Whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely,
as she laughed coming home from church.

The sound of the horses' hoofs going farther away down the avenue comes
through the stillness, as her voice and her laughter cease.

"What a shame to be shut up here just because one isn't old!" she
groans, as she listens enviously. The sun is pouring liquid gold through
the ivy-leaves, the air is hot and fragrant, gardeners are watering the
flower-beds below, and the sweet, moist scent comes up to Dodo's
nostrils and makes her writhe with longing to get out; not that she is
by any means ardently devoted to nature, but she loves life, movement,
gayety, and she dearly loves showing off her figure on her pony and
being flirted with by her father's friends.

"I am sure Lord Brandolin is in love with her, awfully in love," she
says, as she peers into the distance, where the black form of Satan is
just visible through far-off oak-boughs.

"With whom?" asks Lilie, getting up from her caricature to lean also out
over the ivy.

"Xenia," says Dodo. She is very proud of calling her friend Xenia. "Take
care Goggles don't wake, or she'll see what you've been doing."

The lady from Deutschland was always known to them by this endearing
epithet.

"I don't care," says Lilie, kicking her bronze boots in the air. "Do you
think she'll marry Lord Brandolin?"

"Who? Goggles?"

"The idea!" They laugh deliciously.

"You say he's in love with Xenia. If they're in love they will marry,"
says Lilie, pensively.

"No, they won't: people who are in love never