tapestry table-cover, the long labor of centuries past, lay the brief,
delicate work of a week ago in the shape of silk and muslin
dresses turned inside out. In the midst of all these confusions and
contradictions, Miss Jessie ranged to and fro, the active center of the
whole scene of disorder, now singing at the top of her voice, and now
declaring in her lighthearted way that one of us must make up his mind
to marry her immediately, as she was determined to settle for the rest
of her life at The Glen Tower.

She followed up that announcement, when we met at dinner, by inquiring
if we quite understood by this time that she had left her "company
manners" in London, and that she meant to govern us all at her absolute
will and pleasure, throughout the whole period of her stay. Having thus
provided at the outset for the due recognition of her authority by the
household generally and individually having briskly planned out all her
own forthcoming occupations and amusements over the wine and fruit at
dessert, and having positively settled, between her first and second
cups of tea, where our connection with them was to begin and where it
was to end, she had actually succeeded, when the time came to separate
for the night, in setting us as much at our ease, and in making herself
as completely a necessary part of our household as if she had lived
among us for years and years past.

Such was our first day's experience of the formidable guest whose
anticipated visit had so sorely and so absurdly discomposed us all. I
could hardly believe that I had actually wasted hours of precious time
in worrying myself and everybody else in the house about the best
means of laboriously entertaining a lively, high-spirited girl, who
was perfectly capable, without an effort on her own part or on ours, of
entertaining herself.

Having upset every one of our calculations on the first day of her
arrival, she next falsified all our predictions before she had been with
us a week. Instead of fracturing her skull with the pony, as Morgan had
prophesied, she sat the sturdy, sure-footed, mischievous little brute as
if she were part and parcel of himself. With an old water-proof cloak of
mine on her shoulders, with a broad-flapped Spanish hat of Owen's on her
head, with a wild imp of a Welsh boy following her as guide and groom on
a bare-backed pony, and with one of the largest and ugliest cur-dogs
in England (which she had picked up, lost and starved