Miss Castlevaine looked at her watch for the twentieth time.  “It is a quarter past five!” she frowned.  “Where can they be!”

“We may as well sit down while we wait,” laughed Mrs. Albright.  “Wandering round in a circle won’t bring them any quicker.”  She lowered herself plumply beside Miss Sterling.

“Now don’t you go to worrying!” she said.  “They haven’t been eaten up by bears or carried off by hawks.  Probably they are having so good a time they have forgotten to come back.”

The sun dropped lower and lower.  The wayside shadows thickened.  A robin on the top-most branch of a locust sang a solo.

“There they are!” cried Miss Castlevaine.

The others looked eagerly down the road.

The thud of hoofs came out of the hush.

“Oh, it’s only a team!” was the disappointed contradiction.  “I saw the dust and thought they were coming.”

The buggy whirled up, the driver lifted his hat with a smiling bow—­and was gone.

“Mr. Randolph and Miss Puddicombe!” commented Miss Castlevaine.  “Who was he bowing to?  Not me!”

“I have met him,” responded Mrs. Albright.

“Oh!  Maybe it was you, then.  But he was looking at Miss Sterling!”

“She knows him, too, and so does Mrs. Adlerfeld.”

“Oh!” repeated Miss Castlevaine.  “I see him riding with that Miss Puddicombe a good deal lately.  Guess she’s trying to catch him.”

“They are coming now for certain!” exclaimed Mrs. Albright.

Away in the distance the returning party could be discerned.  Soon there was a waving of eager hands.  The forward ones started on a race.

“It’s Miss Crilly and the children!” Mrs. Albright laughed.  “Isn’t she game!”

Polly and David were ahead.

“Are you tired out waiting?” called Polly.

“Have you been to Buckline?” twinkled Mrs. Albright.

“Almost!” answered David.

“We’ve had such a time!” laughed Polly.

“Time!” burst in Miss Crilly.  “We’d been goners, sure, if we hadn’t jumped like fleas!  My!  You oughter seen Miss Mullaly—­if she didn’t go hand-springin’ over that wall!”

“But what was it?” cried Mrs. Albright.

“A cow!”—­“An ugly old cow!”—­“She went bellowin’ like Sancho Panza set loose!”

“Did she chase you?  What did you do?”

“She was coming for us, and we jumped over the wall!  We were on our way home,” explained Polly.

“And David wanted to go and drive her off, so we could get by,” put in Leonora; “but I held on to him!”

“I could have done it as well as that man,” insisted David, looking somewhat disgusted at the lack of faith in his ability.

“He ’most got away from us!” laughed Miss Crilly.  “We all had to grab him!”

“Did the cow’s owner come?” Miss Castlevaine queried.

“We don’t know who it was,” answered Polly.  “We were hiding behind some bushes the other side of the wall.”