daughter, "through a small grass paddock and then through a walled fruit
garden full of gooseberry bushes. I went all over the place last year
when the family were away. There is a door that opens from the fruit
garden into a shrubbery, and once we emerge from there we can mingle with
the guests as if we had come in by the ordinary way. It's much safer
than going in by the front entrance and running the risk of coming bang
up against the hostess; that would be so awkward when she doesn't happen
to have invited us."

"Isn't it a lot of trouble to take for getting admittance to a garden
party?"

"To a garden party, yes; to _the_ garden party of the season, certainly
not. Every one of any consequence in the county, with the exception of
ourselves, has been asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far more
troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren't there than to get
in by a roundabout way. I stopped Mrs. Cuvering in the road yesterday
and talked very pointedly about the Princess. If she didn't choose to
take the hint and send me an invitation it's not my fault, is it? Here
we are: we just cut across the grass and through that little gate into
the garden."

Mrs. Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for a county garden party
function with an infusion of Almanack de Gotha, sailed through the narrow
grass paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the air of state
barges making an unofficial progress along a rural trout stream. There
was a certain amount of furtive haste mingled with the stateliness of
their advance, as though hostile search-lights might be turned on them at
any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not unobserved. Matilda
Cuvering, with the alert eyes of thirteen years old and the added