68 THE GARDEN OF A 



fear of appearing intrusive, so completely we were 

 enthralled, and so uncomfortable had the condition of 

 affairs become. That very morning Tim had given 

 a roundabout warning that if his stable precincts 

 were daily interfered with by the Schmidt women 

 there was no use in his trying to do his work. 



During the afternoon there was much hammer- 

 ing at the stable, to which Aunt Lot called father's 

 attention, but he merely laughed, and said he sup- 

 posed they were decorating. We wondered ; for 

 the rooms, though comfortable and ample for dwell- 

 ing purposes, were hardly suitable for a ball. 



But when he returned at midnight, after a long 

 drive across the hills in a pouring rain that had 

 set in at dark, and discovered there was no place 

 where he could get under cover, he was angry 

 indeed. The vehicles from the carriage house were 

 standing out under the trees, carelessly covered from 

 the wet, while a somewhat dreary and spiritless 

 dance was going on in that building to the music 

 of harp and fiddle, the participants being chiefly an 

 undesirable class of factory hands, asked because 

 others had declined, and a few young people of 

 the neighbourhood who, evidently having come 

 from a kindly schoolmate feeling, looked conscious 

 and out of place. Father rang the stable bell for 



