| PAGE | |
| Persis was at that moment knitting her brows over some papers at a table in Annis’s little attic room | [Frontispiece.] |
| “Then, my dear, you are wearing your own great-great-grandmother’s gown” | [84] |
| “Please tell Mrs. Chamberlaine that Ruth is safe” | [148] |
| “This is Mary Carter’s grandchild” | [212] |
THREE PRETTY MAIDS.
CHAPTER I.
HOW THEY LIVED.
It was in a comfortable-looking house, surrounded by a garden, in the most attractive part of a pleasant city not two hundred miles from the nation’s capital, that the mother of the pretty maids sat sewing one day in early October. She was listening for the first footstep which should announce the return of her girls from school. And presently she heard the front door shut, then a quick, light step on the stair, and a voice coming nearer and nearer, singing,—
“Where are you going, my pretty maid?”
Then the door burst open and Persis Holmes appeared.
“Where are you going, my pretty maid?” Mrs. Holmes asked. “At the rate at which you are travelling I think you will go straight through the wall. Where are the others?”
Persis laughed. “I am going at something of a gait,” she replied. “I always do that way. I can’t be stately to save me. Where are the others? Let me see. Lisa was too dignified to run home, and Mellicent is so daft about Audrey Vane that she must walk home with her every day, consequently I,—only I,—the unqueenly, the unsentimental, am here, as you see, to get the kiss you have all fresh for me.” And Persis gave her mother a vigorous hug.