Ef May looked up sharply.

“What’s that for?” she asked with a suspicious look at her sister’s guilty face.

“Because—well, I guess its because its the fashion.”

Ef May pondered the subject for a moment, and then her brow cleared:

“I’ll wear my very bestest one, then, with the tuckered out yoke an’ Humbug trimming,” she said, complacently, “an’ my corals outside.”

Anne obeyed without a word, and the little lady surveyed herself in the glass with a smile of intense satisfaction.

“Ain’t it most time to go?” she asked, and Anne detecting, as she thought, just the ghost of a yawn in the tone, replied briskly:

“Oh no, not for some time yet. Come and sit in my lap,—there lay your head on my shoulder, ea-sy, so as not to tumble the curls, and I’ll sing, ‘Tap, tap, tapping at the garden gate,’ so you won’t get tired of waiting you know.”

Mrs. White’s Party.