Cynthia enjoyed the idea of her own full-grown size and stately gait, as contrasted with that of a meek, half-fledged girl in the nursery; but Miss Browning was half-puzzled and half-affronted.

“I don’t understand it at all. In my days, girls went wherever it pleased people to ask them, without this farce of bursting out in all their new fine clothes at some public place. I don’t mean but what the gentry took their daughters to York, or to Matlock, or Bath, to give them a taste of gay society when they were growing up; and the quality went up to London, and their young ladies were presented to Queen Charlotte, and went to a birth-day ball perhaps. But for us little Hollingford people—why, we knew every child amongst us from the day of its birth; and many a girl of twelve or fourteen have I seen go out to a card-party, and sit quiet at her work, and know how to behave as well as any lady there. There was no talk of ‘coming out’ in those days for any one under the daughter of a Squire.”

“After Easter, Molly and I shall know how to behave at a card-party, but not before,” said Cynthia demurely.

“You’re always fond of your quips and your cranks, my dear,” said Miss Browning, “and I wouldn’t quite answer for your behaviour; you sometimes let your spirits carry you away. But I’m quite sure Molly will be a little lady as she always is, and always was, and I have known her from a babe.”

Mrs. Gibson took up arms on behalf of her own daughter, or, rather, she took up arms against Molly’s praises.

“I don’t think you would have called Molly a lady the other day, Miss Browning, if you had found her where I did: sitting up in a cherry-tree, six feet from the ground at least, I do assure you.”

“Oh! but that wasn’t pretty,” said Miss Browning, shaking her head at Molly. “I thought you’d left off those tom-boy ways.”

“She wants the refinement which good society gives in several ways,” said Mrs. Gibson, returning to the attack on poor Molly. “She’s very apt to come upstairs two steps at a time.”

“Only two, Molly?” said Cynthia. “Why, to-day I found I could manage four of these broad, shallow steps.”

“My dear child, what are you saying?”

“Only confessing that I, like Molly, want the refinements which good society gives; therefore, please do let us go to the Miss Brownings’ this evening. I will pledge myself for Molly that she shan’t sit in a cherry- tree; and Molly shall see that I don’t go upstairs in an unladylike way. I will go upstairs as meekly as if I were a come-out young lady, and had been to the Easter ball.”

So it was agreed that they should go. If Mr. Osborne Hamley had been named as one of the probable visitors, there would have been none of this difficulty about the affair.

But, though he was not there, his brother Roger was. Molly saw him in a minute, when she entered the little drawing-room; but Cynthia did not.

“And see, my dears,” said Miss Phœbe Browning, turning them round to the side where Roger stood, waiting for his turn of speaking to Molly; “we’ve got a gentleman for you after all! Wasn’t it fortunate?—just as sister said that you might find it dull—you, Cynthia, she meant, because you know you come from France—then, just as if he had been sent from heaven, Mr. Roger came in to call; and I won’t say we laid violent hands on him, because he was too good for that; but really we should have been near it, if he had not stayed of his own accord.”

The moment Roger had done his cordial greeting to Molly, he asked her to introduce him to Cynthia.

“I want to know her—your new sister,” he added, with the kind smile that Molly remembered so well, since the very first day she had seen it directed towards her, as she sate crying under the weeping-ash.