all door, and Miss Tredgold
gazed around her.

Miss Tredgold was a very thin, tall woman of about forty-five years of
age. She was dressed in the extreme of fashion. She wore a perfectly
immaculate traveling dress of dark-gray tweed. It fitted her
well-proportioned figure like a glove. She had on a small, very neat
black hat, and a spotted veil surrounded her face. She stepped down from
the pony cart and looked around her.

"Ah!" she said, seeing Verena, "will you kindly mention to some of the
ladies of the family that I have arrived?"

"I think I need not mention it, because we all know," said Verena. "I am
your niece Verena."

"You!"

Miss Tredgold could throw unutterable scorn into her voice. Verena
stepped back, and her pretty face grew first red and then pale. What she
would have said next will never be known to history, for at that instant
the very good child, Penelope, appeared out of the house.

"Is you my Aunty Sophy?" she said. "How are you, Aunty Sophy? I am very
pleased to see you."

Miss Sophia stared for a moment at Penelope. Penelope was hideously
attired, but she was at least clean. The other girls were anyhow. They
were disheveled; they wore torn and unsightly skirts; their hair was
arranged anyhow or not at all; on more than one face appeared traces of
recent acquaintance with the earth in the shape of a tumble. One little
girl with very black eyes had an ugly scratch across her left cheek;
another girl had the gathers out of her frock, which streamed in the most
hopeless fashion on the ground.

"How do you do?" said Aunt Sophia. "Where is your father? Will you have
the goodness, little girl, to acquaint your father with the fact that his
sister-in-law, Sophia Tredgold, has come?"

"Please come into the house, Aunt Sophy, and I'll take you to father's
study--so I will," exclaimed champion Penelope.

CHAPTER III.

PREPARING FOR THE FIGHT.

Penelope held up a chubby hand, which Miss Tredgold pretended not to see.

"Go on in front, little girl," she said. "Don't paw me. I hate being
pawed by children."

Penelope's back became very square as she listened to these words, and
the red which suffused her face went right round her neck. But she walked
solemnly on in front without a word.

"Aunties are unpleasant things," she said to herself; "but, all the same,
I mean to fuss over this one."

Here she opened a door, flung it wide, and cried out to her parent:

"Paddy, here comes A