Barbara Case, sulkily walking alone in her father’s garden, heard the happy voices and, crouching behind the hedge that divided her from the other children, she listened to their plans.

“Where is Susan?” were the first words she overheard.

“Yes, where is Susan?” repeated a boy called Philip, stopping short in a tune he was playing on his pipe:  “I want her to sing me this air, I can’t remember how it goes.”

“And I wish Susan would come, I’m sure,” cried Mary, a little girl whose lap was full of primroses.  “She will give me some thread to tie up my nosegays, and she will show me where the fresh violets grow, and she has promised to give me a great bunch of her cowslips to wear to-morrow.  I wish she would come.”

“Nothing can be done without Susan!” cried another child.  “She always shows us where the nicest flowers are to be found in the lanes and meadows.”

“Susan must help to weave the garlands,” said another.

“Susan must be Queen of the May!” shouted several together.

“Why does she not come?” grumbled Philip.

Rose, who was Susan’s special friend, now came forward to remind them that when Susan was late it was always because she was needed at home.

“Go, Rose, and tell her to make haste,” cried the impatient Philip.  “Attorney Case is dining at the Abbey to-day, and if he comes home and finds us here, perhaps he will drive us away.  He says this bit of ground belongs to his garden, but that is not true, for Farmer Price says we have all as much right to it as he has.  He wants to rob us of our playground.  I wish he and Bab, or Miss Barbara, as I suppose we must now call her, were a hundred miles away, I do.  Just yesterday she knocked down my ninepins on purpose as she passed with her gown trailing in the dust.”

“Yes,” cried Mary, “her gown is always trailing.  She does not hold it up nicely like Susan, and in spite of all her fine clothes she never looks half so neat.  Mamma says she hopes I shall grow like Susan, and so do I. I should not like to be vain like Barbara were I ever so rich.”

“Rich or poor,” said Philip, “it does not become a girl to be vain, much less bold, as Barbara was the other day.  She stood at her father’s door, and stared at a strange gentleman who stopped near by, to let his horse drink.  I know what he thought of Bab, by his looks, and of Susan too; for Susan was in her garden, bending down a branch of the laburnum-tree, looking at its yellow flowers which had just come out, and when the gentleman asked her how many miles it was to the next village, she answered him modestly, not bashfully as if she had never seen any one before, but just right.  Then she pulled on her straw hat that had fallen back while she was looking up at the laburnum, and went her way home, and the gentleman said to me after she was gone, ‘Pray, who is that neat, modest girl?’ But I wish,” cried Philip, interrupting himself, “I wish Susan would come!”