“What? What?” demanded two or three at once.
“Marj is engaged?” suggested Alice, always anxious for romance.
“Don’t be silly!” said Marjorie, frigidly.
“Well, you’ll never guess, so I might as well tell you,” said Lily, amused at Marjorie’s indignation. “We are to have a scout lieutenant to chaperone us this summer.”
“Who?” demanded Florence Evans, excitedly. “Not my sister Edith?”
“No—nobody like her. You couldn’t imagine two people more different; in fact this woman is different from anybody else we ever had in the troop. She is really an awful old maid—about seventy, I guess—and wears spectacles, and thinks girls of seventeen or eighteen are mere infants. She—”
Lily rejoiced to see the girls all growing furiously angry. How did such a thing ever happen? Was this Mrs. Remington’s doing? Ethel interrupted Lily by demanding, sharply,
“What’s this dreadful person’s name?”
Lily had not thought of a name for her. So, under the necessity of inventing one on the spur of the moment, it sounded perhaps a trifle too prim.
“Miss Prudence Proctor!” she announced, avoiding Marjorie’s eyes.