"Oh, Ruthie! don't say you won't go," begged Agnes.
"I'll never go to that Overlook House unless we pay our way--be sure of that," declared the angry Ruth.
"But we _are_ going to the shore, Ruthie?" asked Tess.
"Maybe Pearl Harrod will ask us again," murmured Agnes, hopefully.
"I guess we can pay our way and be beholden to nobody," said Ruth, shortly. "I will hire one of the tents, if nothing else. And we'll start the very day after High closes, just as we planned."
Despite the loss of her "soulmate," Agnes was pretty cheerful. She was to graduate from grammar school; and although she was sorry to lose Miss Georgiana Shipman as a teacher, she was delighted to get out of "the pigtail classes," as she rudely termed the lower grades.
"I'm going to do up my hair, Ruthie, whatever you say," she declared, "just as soon as I get into high school next fall. I'm old enough to forget braids and hair-ribbons, I should hope!"
"Not yet, my child, not yet," laughed Ruth. "Why! there are more girls in High who wear their hair _down_ than _up_."
"You mean, you'd be big," chuckled Neale, "if you were only rolled out," for he was always teasing Agnes about her plumpness.
"Well! I want to celebrate some way," sighed Agnes. "Can't we have a specially nice supper that night?"
"Surely, child," said her sedate sister. "What do you want?"
"Well!" repeated Agnes, slowly; "you know I'll never graduate from Grammar again. Couldn't we kill some of those nice frying chickens of yours, Ruthie?"
"Oh, my!" cried Neale. "What have the poor chickens done that they should be slaughtered to make a Roman holiday?"
"Mr. Smartie!" snapped Agnes. "You be good, or you sha'n't have any."
"If that Tom Jonah hadn't been busy on a certain night, none of us would have eaten those particular frying chickens," laughed Neale. "I wonder if that Gypsy is running yet?"
"He didn't get the frying chickens in the bag," said Agnes. "They were in another coop. We hatched them in January and brought them up by hand. Say! I don't believe you know much about natural history, Neale, anyway."
"I guess he knows more than Sammy Pinkney does," Tess said, again drawn into the conversation. "Teacher asked him to tell us two breeds of dairy cattle and which gives the most milk. She'd been reading to us about it out of a book. So Sammy says: