tried to remember each
other's titles). "Dear me, Duke, what are you doing here?"

"I am looking at her," he answered. "I'm in love. I fell in love
with her the minute Cynthia took her out of her box. I am going to
marry her."

"But she's a lady of high degree," said Ridiklis quite alarmed.

"That's why she'll have me," said Peter Piper in his most cheerful
manner. "Ladies of high degree always marry the good looking ones
in rags and tatters. If I had a whole suit of clothes on, she
wouldn't look at me. I'm very good-looking, you know," and he
turned round and winked at Ridiklis in such a delightful saucy way
that she suddenly felt as if he _was_ very good-looking, though she
had not thought of it before.

"Hello," he said all at once. "I've just thought of something to
attract her attention. Where's the ball of string?"

Cynthia's kitten had made them a present of a ball of string which
had been most useful. Ridiklis ran and got it, and all the others
came running upstairs to see what Peter Piper was going to do. They
all were delighted to hear he had fallen in love with the lovely,
funny Lady Patsy. They found him standing in the middle of the
attic unrolling the ball of string.

"What are you going to do, Duke?" they all shouted.

"Just you watch," he said, and he began to make the string into a
rope ladder--as fast as lightning. When he had finished it, he
fastened one end of it to a beam and swung the other end out of
the window.

"From her window," he said, "she can see Racketty-Packetty House
and I'll tell you something. She's always looking at it. She
watches us as much as we watch her, and I have seen her giggling
and giggling when we were having fun. Yesterday when I chased Lady
Meg and Lady Peg and Lady Kilmanskeg round and round the front of
the house and turned summersaults every five steps, she laughed
until she had to stuff her handkerchief into her mouth. When we
joined hands and danced and laughed until we fell in heaps I
thought she was going to have a kind of rosy-dimpled, lovely little
fit, she giggled so. If I run down the side of the house on this
rope ladder it will attract her attention and then I shall begin to
do things."

He ran down the ladder and that very minute they saw Lady Patsy at
her window give a start and lean forward to look. They all crowded
round their window and chuckled and chuckled as they watched him.

[Transcriber's Note: See picture chuckled.jpg]

He turned