"I declare! aren't you ever going to grow beyond making those absurd remarks of yours ?" "Maybe--sometime," laughed Billy, as she took little Kate's hand and led the way up the steps.
Luncheon in the cozy dining-room at Hillside that day was not entirely a success.

At least there were not present exactly the harmony and tranquillity that are conceded to be the best sauce for one's food.

The wedding, of course, was the all-absorbing topic of conversation; and Billy, between Aunt Hannah's attempts to be polite, Marie's to be sweet-tempered, Mrs.Hartwell's to be dictatorial, and her own to be pacifying as well as firm, had a hard time of it.

If it had not been for two or three diversions created by little Kate, the meal would have been, indeed, a dismal failure.
But little Kate--most of the time the personification of proper little-girlhood--had a disconcerting faculty of occasionally dropping a word here, or a question there, with startling effect.

As, for instance, when she asked Billy "Who's going to boss your wedding ?" and again when she calmly informed her mother that when _she_ was married she was not going to have any wedding at all to bother with, anyhow.