"We've been looking for you for the last half hour. Come right along. Nellie and Rob can hardly contain themselves, they have been so afraid you wouldn't come."
He led the way around the house, and soon had ushered the new-comers into a large, square parlor with long windows opening on a broad veranda.
"Nellie, Rob," he said, "here are the 'Warrior Maidens,' of whom you have heard so much."
The two children, Nellie about fourteen, and Rob a few years younger, bowed bashfully, and then looked appealingly at their elder brother, as they sat down on the two chairs farthest removed from those occupied by their guests. The moon was now above the tree tops, and shone into the room brightly through the long windows.
They passed unto an enchanted country.—See page 75.
"A glorious night for a game of hide-and-seek," said the older brother suggestively, in answer to an unspoken appeal of the younger ones.
"And this would be a grand place for it," said Miss Kitty. "I used to think a game of I-spy on a moonlight night the finest thing in the world. Suppose we try it now?"
"Yes! yes!" they all exclaimed; and, headed by their young hosts, rushed out of doors, and for half an hour made the hills echo with their shouts of merriment.
Such places as there were in which to hide!—a dark corner in the grape arbor, a nook in the vine-covered summer-house, a deep-shadowed projection from the stable or house or veranda: such chances to "make home" around the house, which stood in the center of the yard! Miss Kitty generally came in first, but once, after long searching, she was found in the hollow of a tree into which she had crawled, and from which, being caught in her own trap, she had to be pulled out by the united efforts of her brother and niece.