CHAPTER X.
"Those that Fortune makes fair she scarce makes honest; and those she makes honest she makes very ill-favourably."
We are at a children's party, Dolly and I. Jack was asked, but is too proud to come. It is five o'clock, and the sun, who has been standing over us all the afternoon, frizzling our brains, and making himself obnoxious, as he only knows how to do in the middle of July, is kindly sinking somewhat in the west. We have, with the usual insanity and waste of very young people, been playing at all manner of energetic games, and are now engaged in the comparatively mild recreation of "Kiss-in-the-ring." Kissing is not reprehensible until one is grown up, I suppose; at any rate, these little girls take their boisterous forfeits quite placidly, occasionally return them even with an artless generosity that is not half appreciated by the stolid recipients of the same.
I am not a little girl, but a big one, and there is no boy present old enough or tall enough to kiss me unless I chose. Besides, no one has caught me yet: I can beat them all. I always was good at running; that and jumping being the two doubtful accomplishments Jack has taught me to perfection.
I am laughing heartily at the dismal fate my last pursuer has just met, his white duck trousers being in fact one green smudge, from an involuntary acquaintance he has made with mother earth, when Mrs. Floyd, our hostess, comes across the garden, and by her side is that yellow-haired laddie, young Tempest. Hardly a laddie though, for he must be twenty if he is a day, and has the square, broad-shouldered figure of a man.
A not particularly clean piece of cambric dropped at my heels, and a vision of a nimble youth of tender years scurrying away in the distance, sets me off in fleet pursuit. He has a good start, so I do not catch him, but walk slowly round until I come to Teddy
