he back door, and before she reached
it, she heard enough to let her guess the sort of welcome she might
expect to receive.

Just inside the open door stood Aunt Filomena, a thin, red-faced,
voluble woman, with her arms akimbo, pouring out words as fast as they
could come; and in the yard, just outside the door, opposite to her,
stood her daughter Ankaret, in exactly the same attitude, also thin,
red-faced, and voluble. The two were such precise counterparts of one
another that Avice had hard work to keep her gravity. Inside the house,
Susanna and Mildred, and outside Eleanor, were acting as interested
spectators; the funniest part of the scene being that neither of them
listened to a word said by the other, but each ran at express speed on
her own rails. The youngest daughter, Bertha, was nowhere to be seen.

For a minute the whole appearance of things struck Avice as so
excessively comical that she could scarcely help laughing. But then she
realised how shocking it really was. What sort of mothers, in their
turn, could such daughters be expected to make? She waited for a
moment's pause, and when it occurred, which was not for some minutes,
she said--

"Aunt Filomena!"

"Oh, you're there, are you?" demanded the amiable Filomena. "You just
thank the stars you've got no children! If ever an honest woman were
plagued with six good-for-nothing, sluttish, slatternly shrews of girls
as me! Here's that Ankaret--I've told her ten times o'er to wash the
tubs out, and get 'em ready for the pickling, and I come to see if they
are done, and they've never been touched, and my lady sitting upstairs
a-making her gown fine for Sunday! I declare, I'll--"

Her intentions were drowned in an equally shrill scream from Miss
Ankaret. "You never told me a word--not once! And 'tain't my place to
scour them tubs out, neither. It's Susanna as always--"

"Then I won't!" broke in Susanna. "And you might be ashamed of
yourself, I should think, to put such messy work on me when Eleanor--"

"You'd best let me alone!" fiercely chimed in Eleanor.

"Oh dear, dear!" cried Avice, putting her hands over her ears. "My dear
cousins, are you going to drive each other deaf? Why, I would rather
scour out twenty tubs than fight over them like this! Are you not
Christian women? Come, now, who is going to scour the tubs? I will
take one myself if you will do the others. Who will join me?"

And Avice began to turn up her sleeves in go