their tête-a-tête was curtailed by the appearance of Mrs Deane with little Lucy, and Mrs Tulliver had to look on with a silent pang while Lucy's blond curls were adjusted. It was quite unaccountable that Mrs Deane, the thinnest and sallowest of all the Miss Dodsons, should have had this child who might have been taken for Mrs Tulliver's any day. And Maggie always looked twice as dark as usual when she was by the side of Lucy.

She did to-day, when she and Tom came in from the garden with their father and their uncle Glegg. Maggie had thrown her bonnet off very carelessly and coming in with her hair rough as well as out of curl, rushed at once to Lucy, who was standing by her mother's knee. Certainly the contrast between the cousins was conspicuous and to superficial eyes was very much to the disadvantage of Maggie, though a connoisseur might have seen `points' in her which had a higher promise for maturity than Lucy's natty completeness: it was like the contrast between a rough, dark, overgrown puppy and a white kitten. Lucy put up the neatest little rosebud mouth to be kissed: everything about her was neat - her little round neck with the row of coral beads, her little straight nose, not at all snubby, her little clear eyebrows, rather darker than her curls, to match her hazel eyes which looked up with shy pleasure at Maggie, taller by the head, though scarcely a year older. Maggie always looked at Lucy with delight. She was fond of fancying a world where the people never got any larger than children of their own age, and she made the queen of it just like Lucy with a little crown on her head and a little sceptre in her hand... only the queen was Maggie herself in Lucy's form.

`O Lucy,' she burst out, after kissing her, `You'll stay with Tom and me, won't you? O kiss her, Tom.'

Tom, too, had come up to Lucy, but he was not going to kiss her - no - he came up to her with Maggie because it seemed easier on the whole than saying, how do you do to all those aunts and uncles: he stood looking at nothing in particular, with the blushing awkward air and semismile which are common to shy boys when in company - very much as if they had come into the world by mistake and found it in a degree of undress that was quite embarrassing.

`Heyday!' said aunt Glegg with loud emphasis, `do little boys and gells come into a room without taking notice o'their uncles and aunts? That wasn't the way when I was a little gell.'

`Go and speak to your aunts and uncles, my dears,' said Mrs Tulliver, looking anxious and melancholy. She wanted to whisper to Maggie a command to go and have her hair brushed.

`Well, and how do you do? And I hope you're good children, are you?' said aunt Glegg, in the same loud emphatic way, as she took their hands, hurting them with her large rings and kissing their cheeks much against their desire. `Look up, Tom, look up. Boys as go to boarding-schools should hold their heads up. Look at me, now.' Tom declined that pleasure, apparently, for he tried to draw his hand away. `Put your hair behind your ears, Maggie, and keep your frock on your shoulder.'

Aunt Glegg always spoke to them in this loud emphatic way, as if she considered them deaf or perhaps rather idiotic: it was a means, she thought, of making them feel that they were accountable creatures, and might be a salutary check on naughty tendencies. Bessy's children were so spoiled -they'd need have somebody to make them feel their duty.

`Well, my dears,' said aunt Pullet, in a compassionate voice, `you grow, wonderful fast. I doubt they'll outgrow their strength,' she added, looking over their heads with a melancholy expression at their mother. `I think the gell has too much hair. I'd have it thinned and cut shorter, sister, if I was you: it isn't good for her health. It's that as makes her skin so brown, I shouldn't wonder. Don't you think so, sister Deane?'

I can't say, I'm sure, sister,' said Mrs Deane, shutting her lips close again, and looking at Maggie with a critical eye.