“Mother didn’t say that.  Impatience, and you’d better not let her hear you saying it,” Pauline warned.

But Patience was busy with the tack hammer.  “You can take the inside covers off,” she said to Hilary.

“Thanks, awfully,” Hilary murmured.

“It’ll be my turn next, won’t it?” Patience dropped the tack hammer, and wrenched off the cover of the box—­“Go ahead, Hilary!  Oh, how slow you are!”

For Hilary was going about her share of the unpacking in the most leisurely way.  “I want to guess first,” she said.  “Such a lot of wrappings!  It must be something breakable.”

“A picture, maybe,” Pauline suggested.  Patience dropped cross-legged on the floor.  “Then I don’t think Uncle Paul’s such a very sensible sort of person,” she said.

“No, not pictures!” Hilary lifted something from within the box, “but something to get pictures with.  See, Paul!”

“A camera!  Oh, Hilary!”

“And not a little tiny one.”  Patience leaned over to examine the box.  “It’s a three and a quarter by four and a quarter.  We can have fun now, can’t we?” Patience believed firmly in the cooperative principle.

“Tom’ll show you how to use it,” Pauline said.  “He fixed up a dark room last fall, you know, for himself.”

“And here are all the doings.”  Patience came to investigate the further contents of the express package.  “Films and those funny little pans for developing in, and all.”

Inside the camera was a message to the effect that Mr. Shaw hoped his niece would be pleased with his present and that it would add to the summer’s pleasures,

“He’s getting real uncley, isn’t he?” Patience observed.  Then she caught sight of the samples Pauline had let fall.  “Oh, how pretty!  Are they for dresses for us?”

“They’d make pretty scant ones, I’d say,” Pauline, answered.

“Silly!” Patience spread the bright scraps out on her blue checked gingham apron.  “I just bet you’ve been choosing!  Why didn’t you call me?”

“To help us choose?” Pauline asked, with a laugh.

But at the present moment, her small sister was quite impervious to sarcasm.  “I think I’ll have this,” she pointed to a white ground, closely sprinkled with vivid green dots.

“Carrots and greens!” Pauline declared, glancing at her sister’s red curls.  “You’d look like an animated boiled dinner!  If you please, who said anything about your choosing?”

“You look ever so nice in all white, Patty,” Hilary said hastily.

“Have you and Paul chosen all white?”

“N-no.”

“Then I shan’t!” She looked up quickly, her blue eyes very persuasive.  “I don’t very often have a brand new, just-out-of-the-store dress, do I?”

Pauline laughed.  “Only don’t let it be the green then.  Good, here’s mother, at last!”

“Mummy, is blue or green better?” Patience demanded.