"Ah—yes! What is the succession of the sovereigns of England? Name them!"
Now, if Miss Pepperill had demanded that Tess Kenway name the Pleiades, the latter would have been no more startled—or no less able to reply intelligently.
"Ah—yes!" snapped Miss Pepperill, seeing Tess' vacuous expression. "I shall ask you that the first day you are in my room. Be prepared to answer it. The succession of the sovereigns of England," and she swept on into the store, leaving the children on the sidewalk, wonderfully impressed.
They had walked over into the Parade Ground, and seated themselves on one of the park benches in sight of the old Corner House, as Milton people had called the Stower homestead, on the corner of Willow Street, from time immemorial. Tess' hopeless announcement followed their sitting on the bench for at least half an hour.
"Why, I can't never!" she sighed, making it positive by at least two negatives. "I never had an idea England had such an awful long string of kings. It's worse than the list of Presidents of the United States."
"Is it?" Dot observed, curiously. "It must be awful annoyable to have to learn 'em."
"Goodness, Dot! There you go again with one of your big words," exclaimed Tess, in vexation. "Who ever heard of 'annoyable' before? You must have invented that."
Dot calmly ignored the criticism. It must be confessed that she loved the sound of long words, and sometimes, as Agnes said, "made an awful mess of polysyllables." Agnes was the Kenway next older than Tess, while Ruth was seventeen, the oldest of all, and had for more than three years been the house-mother of the Kenway family.
Ruth and Agnes were at home in the old Corner House at this very hour. There lived in the big dwelling, with the four Corner House Girls, Aunt Sarah Maltby (who really was no relative of the girls, but a partial charge upon their charity), Mrs. MacCall, their housekeeper, and old Uncle Rufus, Uncle Peter Stower's black butler and general factotum, who had been left to the care of the old man's heirs when he died.
The first volume of this series, called "The Corner House Girls," told the story of the coming of the four sisters and Aunt Sarah Maltby to the Stower homestead, and of their first adventures in Milton—getting settled in their new home and making friends among their neighbors.