“London,” announced Mary Price, “is just like a moody person. When she is sunny and warm, she is so charming one would never dream how black and ugly she could be.”

“She’s in a very good humor this morning,” exclaimed Billie, trying to bottle up her overflowing spirits until the others had finished their toilets, that they might all go forth together to see the sights.

It was the morning after the opera and their thoughts were still taken up with the great occasion. Nancy hummed the wedding chorus as she twisted her curls around her fingers, and smiled lovingly at her image in the glass.

“Are you quite ready, now, children?” said Miss Campbell suddenly; a question which caused the Motor Maids to smile secretly, since Miss Helen herself had been keeping them all waiting some quarter of an hour, while she arranged her hat and veil, drew on her immaculate pearl-gray gloves and pinned a jabot of fine Irish lace at her neck.

“What are we to see first, Billie, dear? Have you arranged a schedule for the day? You are to be guide, remember.”

“I had planned Westminster Abbey,” said Billie, “if that’s agreeable to all concerned.”

It was decidedly a delightful thing to do, and two at least of the five tourists were thrilled at the notion. All her life Mary had longed to see the great cathedral, and Elinor, also, was moved with a deep pleasure at the thought. Nancy, gay butterfly that she was, was not so overcome by the solemnity of the visit.

“Has each person some special thing that she wants to see most? If so, let her wishes be known before we get there, so plans may be made accordingly,” announced Billie.

“I want to see the Stone of Scone where all the kings have been crowned,” observed Elinor.

“I want to see the tomb of Queen Elizabeth,” put in Nancy, after deep thought.

“I know why,” cried Billie. “Because she had several hundreds of dresses.”

“You’re just a tease, Billie. It’s because she was a great queen.”

“I want to see the Poets’ Corner,” announced Mary.

“We shall certainly see all those things and a great deal more,” said Miss Campbell.

They entered the Abbey by the western door and stood silently in a little group, looking up at the great stone arches which seemed to them like the spreading limbs of ancient forest trees. A pale ray of sunlight flickered in through one of the enormous windows; but the great church was dim and gloomy with age. Here lay most of England’s dead kings and queens and her great men.

With a Baedeker in one hand and a guide-book of the Abbey in the other, Billie led her friends from chapel to chapel. Even Nancy was subdued and quiet in “this silent meeting place of the great dead of eight centuries.” Mary crept along like a little gray mouse, poking her nose into this tomb and that, and never speaking a word. She intended to write an essay next winter at West Haven High School called “A Visit to Westminster Abbey,” and win a prize for the best thesis of the year.

For hours they wandered through the ancient church. Lunch time passed and they had not even felt the pangs of hunger.

“Just think,” Mary was saying, “Henry VI. was crowned here when he was only nine years old, and the Archbishop put a gold crown on his poor little head; and Richard II., who was just a boy, too, fainted from fatigue when he was crowned and had to be carried out; and Queen Anne cried because her crown hurt her head; and George IV. was almost strangled by his heavy coronation robes.”

“All of which argues,” remarked Billie, “that it’s much more agreeable and comfortable to be a Motor Maid than a royal personage.”

A middle-aged woman dressed in black and a young girl who had wandered up to the tomb of Aveline of Lancaster, where the four girls and Miss Campbell had paused, exchanged an amused glance. As they were moving slowly away, Billie called softly:

“I think you dropped something.”

She had picked up a beautiful little sapphire brooch which had broken from its fastenings and lay shining like a bit of blue sky on the ancient gray floor.

“Oh, you are very kind,” exclaimed the girl hurrying back. “It is my favorite brooch. I would not have lost it for worlds. Thank you very, very much.”

“What charming manners,” thought Billie.

“How pretty she is,” thought Nancy.

“She is very high-bred looking,” was Elinor’s comment to herself.

And Mary thought:

“If she were turned to stone and laid on top of a tomb with her hands crossed, she would look very much like Aveline of Lancaster.”

“I think you must be Americans,” said the young girl, smiling into Billie’s face with a kind of shy frankness.

“We are,” said Billie; “and you are English, of course.”

“Half English.” She paused. “I thank you again, very much.”

Then she turned away rather reluctantly, the girls thought, and they were sorry, too, for some reason.

“Isn’t she sweet?” Mary remarked as the girl disappeared from the chapel.

“So simple, too,” Miss Campbell observed. “So unassuming and such plain, nice clothes.”

“I could almost believe she was poor from her clothes,” put in Nancy, “but her face doesn’t look poor.”

“And, pray, how can you tell whether a person’s face looks poor or rich?” demanded Billie, always ready to enter into an argument with her friend.

“Don’t you know the difference between a poor face and a rich one? Rich faces have a used-to-things expression and poor people always give themselves away by looking surprised.”

A most delicious laugh broke into this grave explanation of Nancy Brown’s. The young girl had come back.

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to be eavesdropping,” she explained, “but we have a card that admits us into the room where the wax effigies are kept. You didn’t know there were wax works in Westminster Abbey, did you? And we thought perhaps you might like to go with us to see them. You know when royal persons died their bodies used to be carried through the streets for the people to see. But later they stopped that practice and effigies of wax were borne instead. And these are some of the effigies. Queen Elizabeth is there——”

“Oh, do let’s go,” cried Nancy.

It ended, therefore, by their accepting the invitation with much pleasure, and presently they found themselves with the English girl and the older woman, who was called “FrÄulein Bloch,” and a verger, in a room over an ancient chapel. Here were laid out in state the waxen effigies of Queen Elizabeth, Charles II., William III. and Queen Mary, his wife, and Queen Anne. Certainly there was something very weird and ghastly about these wax images of kings and queens dead and gone, in all their royal regalia, crowded into glass cases around the wall. There was a battered old wax-doll likeness of the great Queen Elizabeth arrayed in faded finery, and an apathetic Charles in blue and red velvet robes trimmed with real point lace.

William and Mary were leaning up against each other sociably and lovingly in a case all by themselves; and close by was a large, heavy Queen Anne, an elaborate curly wig on her head and on her face a haughty fixed stare.

Whether it was the sight of all this past glory now so crumpled and faded, or whether it was that our tourists had eaten nothing since breakfast, it is hard to say. The Motor Maids always blamed what happened on the Duchess of Richmond. At any rate, Mary Price was standing just in front of that grotesque effigy, which was dressed in the very robes she had worn in life at the coronation of Queen Anne,—and by her side perched a stuffed parrot, said to have lived with her forty years,—when the young girl suddenly turned very pale and slipped down to the floor. So quietly did she fall that the others, who were viewing a jaunty effigy of Admiral Nelson, did not notice the little gray figure lying in a heap on the chapel floor.

It was growing late and the verger reminded them that they must be leaving before closing time. Laughing and talking softly together, they filed slowly out of the gloomy old place and the door was locked. And there all the time lay little Mary, as pale and stark as any of the wax kings and queens in the glass cases above her.

It all came back to them afterward like a curious dream, how they happened not to miss their friend even when they had returned to the church. In a remote corner somewhere a service was evidently being held. The sound of the organ and of boys chanting floated to them. Following their new friend and FrÄulein Bloch, they presently entered the chapel and joined a few scattered worshippers kneeling at their devotions.

It was Billie who first noticed Mary’s absence, and she was rather surprised, because Mary was more religious than the others and loved these ceremonious services.

“Perhaps she is snooping about in some of the tombs,” she thought, and, whispering a word to Miss Campbell, she slipped out of the chapel and began a search for her friend. But Mary was nowhere in sight in the vast, dim place, and, with a somewhat anxious feeling, Billie hastened to join the others, who had now left the chapel and were waiting for her.

“Where is Mary?” she demanded.

But no one had seen Mary. No one could remember to have seen her for a long time. Miss Campbell was not as uneasy as Billie. She was sure that Mary could take care of herself. She was a reliable little thing and knew the address. If she had lost them, the child knew just what to do,—take a hansom and drive straight to their lodgings.

“I dislig to alarb de ladies,” here put in FrÄulein Bloch, “bud de young lady might be by dat room loged.”

“What!” cried Miss Helen; “locked in the room with all those horrible wax figures that look like corpses! Oh, heavens, where is a guide? Suppose the child has been left in that dreadful place? It’s enough to make her go mad.”

Filled with alarm, they hastened to find a verger, but there was no one about. Finally they discovered a very old man with a big bunch of keys.

“Come with us at once to the room with the wax effigies,” cried Miss Campbell. “A young girl has been locked in there by mistake.”

“Have you a permit, Madam?”

“Permit! Permit!” cried the distracted woman. “Do you think I care for permits when one of my children is locked up in a roomful of dead kings and queens and parrots? Go instantly and get the key.”

“It is against the rules, Madam.”

Their new friend, whose name they still did not know, now drew the old man aside and spoke to him in a low voice. Then a most remarkable change came over his aged face.

“The ladies will please follow,” he said with cringing politeness, as he selected a key on the bunch and led the way to the distant chapel where the wax figures were kept.

It was all over very quickly now, but the girls never forgot the picture their friend made when the door was opened. She was kneeling on the floor in a pale shaft of light, the only one in all that gloomy place.

“Mary, my darling,” cried poor Miss Campbell, hastening to her, “were you terribly frightened?”

Mary did not reply at first. She seemed startled by the sudden entrance of her rescuers. She told them afterward that the silence of the chapel was so deep it seemed to have entered into her very soul, and after the first few dreadful moments of her return to consciousness, when she found she had been left behind, she had not been frightened, only overwhelmed and pressed down by the weight of the vast quietude. And Mary was silent now, as her friends gathered around her and helped her to rise.

“I am quite well,” she kept repeating with a faint little smile.

“I am quite to blame,” said the English girl, taking Mary’s hand. “It was I who enticed you into this dismal place.”

“No, no,” protested Mary. “The real reason of it was because we forgot to eat lunch.”

Lunch? They had never thought of it, and immediately five American ladies became desperately weak in the knees and shaky. At least two of them turned pale at the mere suggestion that they had had no nourishment since nine that morning, and one of them, the smallest, most fragile and oldest, cried:

“What a poor excuse for a chaperone I am, that I should let my girls come to the point of starvation and never even notice it!”

“You must be very, very hungry,” said the English girl in her beautiful, cultivated voice, which made the other girls thrill every time she spoke. “It is quite tea time, now, is it not, FrÄulein? I have a delightful idea,” she exclaimed impulsively. “You must have tea with me. You must all go in the car. It is just outside, and this poor dear shall not say she is starved when she visits England.”

“But——” protested Miss Campbell.

“No, no. I really wish it very much. You will come, will you not?” exclaimed this impulsive and charming person, seizing Miss Campbell’s hand.

Thus it happened that Mary’s imprisonment with the wax effigies resulted in the most wonderful tea party that the Motor Maids or Miss Campbell either, for that matter, had ever been to in all their lives.