"Then I'll sit here, if you don't mind," and the girl settled herself in an engulfing armchair with a sigh of satisfaction, her eyes following Miss Blake from place to place as she tripped briskly about, energetically wielding her dust cloth and whisk broom and humming contentedly as she worked.
"Perhaps you won't approve of the plan that I've got in my mind, and won't let Nan go into it," ventured Ruth, presently.
"I can't fancy you suggesting anything that I would so seriously disapprove of as that," returned Miss Blake, smiling kindly, but asking for no further enlightenment on the subject than her guest was inclined to give of her own accord.
"Well, then, it's this: If the cold weather lasts we'll have elegant sleighing, with all this snow, and I want to hire a sleigh, just any common old thing will do, and fill it with straw, and all of us girls and boys go off on a screamingly fine sleigh-ride. If it clears we'll have a full moon, and I think it would just be the jolliest thing in the world. Now please say Nan can go. She'll love to I know, and she always makes things snap so," pleaded the girl, fixing her eyes on Miss Blake's face with a peculiar intensity of expression.
The governess hesitated.
"Oh, please say she can," reiterated Ruth.
"My dear Ruth, I can't say anything until I know more of the matter. You say you girls and boys are to go. What girls and boys do you mean?"
"Why, Lu and Grace and Mary and the Buckstone girls, of course; and John Gardiner and Harley Morris and Everett Webster, and oh! all those fellows—the ones in our set; you've met them all."
"And is there to be no grown woman in the party—no chaperone?" suggested Miss Blake.
Ruth looked down and began picking a thread from the thumb of her glove.