'How very annoying!'

'It is really too bad to have this noisy creature foisted on us just now.'

Katie stood on the doorstep of her aunt's house in a very stiff, pink frock. Her cheeks were red and rosy, for it was a warm summer day, and her feelings were just those of any little girl who is paying her first real visit to an aunt in the country.

The speakers were Katie's two cousins, Janet and Clare, and the words came very clearly through the curtains and open windows, as Katie stood there, wondering whether the bell had really rung, or whether she had better give it another tug. She saw her own reflection in the shining bell-handle, and it had gone crimson all at once.

Poor Katie! Mother had told her she would be expected, and this was what her cousins thought about her!

Was it not a dreadful state of affairs for a small girl at the beginning of her first visit? Katie shut her mouth tight, and clenched her small, hot hands, in a desperate effort to look just ordinary. It was very hard to be brave. She would have liked to run away, but she knew that would be cowardly. Her cheeks kept growing hotter and hotter. It was mean, she had always heard, to listen to things that were not intended for one. Plainly, there was only one course: to go right on, and not let anybody know that she had overheard those dreadful, unkind words.

The waiting and the silence was almost too much. The girls' voices died away in the room; a bee was buzzing in a foxglove bell at her elbow, and some cows went quietly up the lane past the green garden-gate. Then, all at once, the door flew open, and tall Janet and fair-haired Clare stood before her.

'You dear child, have you come all alone? How tired she looks, Clare!'

'Katie, Katie, haven't you got a kiss for your own Clare?'

There was quite a chorus of greetings as they ushered puzzled Katie into a bright room where her invalid aunt, wrapped in a shawl, and rather pale, lay on a couch, holding out both hands to welcome the visitor.

'Oh, dear,' thought Katie, 'I don't know how they can pretend to be so kind!'

She stood there in the midst of them all, awkward and silent, an honest-hearted little girl, obliged to act a most untruthful part. Try as she might, her kisses were but cold ones. She would have liked to push them away, and to cry out: 'You don't love me, really; you said I was a noisy creature! Let me go home.'

It was worse when her kind, suffering aunt took her in her arms, and said she was 'Oh! so glad to have her to stay!' Katie felt such a mean, horrid little girl. She did not know which way to look or where to hide her hot cheeks.

In the middle of the window, a large green parrot was clawing at her perch.

'This is Polly,' said Janet, passing a hand under the great creature's wing. 'The people next door are going away, and they have sent her to us till they come back.'

Here Polly interrupted with a long, loud screech, so that everybody had to put their hands to their ears.

'We rather like her,' said Clare, when she had finished, 'but oh! she is so noisy! Come and stroke her, Katie!'

So that was the 'noisy creature!' Katie's troubles all vanished at a stroke; and before Clare and Janet could ask what was the matter, she was sobbing out all about the silly mistake to her kind aunt.