“Matter?  I don’t know that anything is the matter, except that she doesn’t look like the sort of girl who would be an acquaintance of the Pelhams.  She doesn’t look like their kind, you know.  She wears the plainest sort of dresses,—­just little straight up and down frocks of brown or drab, or those white cambric things,—­they are more like baby-slips than anything; and her hats are just the same,—­great flat all-round hats, not a bit of style to them; and she’s a girl of fourteen or fifteen certainly.  Do you suppose people of the Pelhams’ kind dress like that?”

Will gave a gruff little sound half under his breath, as he asked sarcastically,—­

“How do people of the Pelham kind dress?”

“Oh, like Dora and Amy, and especially like Agnes,—­in the height of the fashion, you know,” Tilly cried laughingly.

“Now, Tilly,” expostulated Dora, “neither Amy nor I overdress.  We wear what all girls of our age—­girls who are almost young ladies—­wear, and I’m sure you wear the same kind of things.”

“Not quite, Dora.  I’ll own, though, I would if I could; but there’s such a lot of us at home that the money gives out before it goes all ’round,” said Tilly, frankly, yet rather ruefully.

“I’m sure you look very nice,” said Dora, politely.  Amy echoed the polite remark, while Will, eying the three with an attempt at a critical estimate, thought to himself, “They don’t look a bit nicer than that girl at the corner table.”

But Will was too wise to give utterance to this thought.  He knew how it would be received; he knew that the three would laugh at him and say, “What does a boy know about girl’s clothes?”

In the mean time, while all this was going on, what was that girl who had suggested the talk, that girl who sat at the corner table in the dining room and who was now lying in a hammock,—­what was she doing, what was she thinking?

CHAPTER II.

She was lying looking up through the green branches of the trees.  She had been reading, but her book was now closed, and she was lying quietly looking up at the blue sky between the branches.  Her thoughts were not quite so quiet as her position would seem to indicate.  She had, as Will Wentworth had said, heard all that talk about the Pelhams.  Whatever her class in life, she was certainly a delicate and honorable young girl; for at the very first, when she found that it was a talk between a party of friends, and they were unconscious of a stranger’s near neighborhood, she had done her best to make her presence known to them by various little coughs and ahems, and once or twice by decided movements, and readjustments of her position.  As no attention was paid to these demonstrations, she finally concluded that none of the party cared whether they were overheard or not, and so settled herself comfortably back again into her place, and opened her book.