ome, child. You know what it is like:
soup-kitchens, mothers' meeting, coal-tickets, reading aloud to the
children, rushing about from this place to the other trying to help
those who cannot help themselves. It will do you good, Lucy, and of
course you shall come."

CHAPTER III.

A GYPSY TEA.

Lessons were not to begin until the following morning, and the six
boarders were feeling in consequence a trifle disconsolate. They did not
know what to do with themselves. They had explored the place the day
before. They had visited the kitchen-garden and the flower-garden, and
the paddocks and the shrubberies and the lawns, and they had wandered
down towards the river. There seemed to be nothing special to do. The
tennis-lawn was not properly mowed for tennis, and anyhow the net was
not out, and there seemed to be no croquet-ground anywhere. In
consequence, there was nothing whatever to do but to pace up and down
under the shadow of the trees a little way from the house.

Rosamund Cunliffe walked with Phyllis Flower, Jane Denton with Agnes
Sparkes, and Laura Everett with her special friend and factotum, Annie
Millar. They were all good-natured, kind-hearted girls, ready to make
the best of things; but as they walked now, pacing up and down, Rosamund
suddenly stopped, faced round, and addressed the rest of her companions.

"Well, girls," she said, "I must say that I think we are placed in a
rather disagreeable position at Sunnyside."

"What do you mean?" asked Laura, opening her wide blue eyes to their
fullest extent.

"Why, can't you judge for yourself? That little Lucy Merriman is
determined to be disagreeable to us. We cannot get her to make herself
the least pleasant; whatever we do she interprets in the wrong manner,
and how we are to keep the peace I don't know. I am sure I don't want
to dislike her or be disagreeable to her; but she is at home, and we are
strangers. She is exceedingly ill-bred, there is no doubt of that. Why
should we put up with it? Ought we not at once to declare our
independence, and to let her know that as we pay--or, rather, our
parents pay for us--a very good sum for our education, she is bound at
least not to make herself obnoxious?"

"Oh, I don't think she is obnoxious," said Agnes Sparkes. "She is just a
little bit jealous. I used to be jealous of a girl once. It is a horrid
sensation."

"Oh, my dear!" said Rosamund slowly, stamping her foot in her endeavor
to speak with emphas