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As may be imagined, Miss Anne Fielding, now nearly seventeen years old, had not seen much of life in the way of parties, so the thought of Admiral Palliser and Mrs. Gresham and Dr. Dale and Robin Dale, all of whom she saw quite often, coming to dine was so exciting as to make her feel rather sick. To add to the excitement her father and mother, who usually only got down from Saturday to Monday, were going to stay at Hall's End for a whole week and Mrs. Morland was coming, and Anne wondered if it would be rude to ask her to write her name in her latest novel which Anne had bought with her own money, or rather with a book token given to her by a dull aunt. Gradka was also excited, for she was going to make a Mixo-Lydian national dish for dinner which needed sour milk; and what with milk rationing and the difficulties of keeping what milk could be spared till it was exactly of the right degree of sourness, she got a good deal behindhand with her work, which was to write an essay about the influence of Hudibras upon English comic rhyming, as exemplified in Byron, the Ingoldsby Legends and the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert. And how Mixo-Lydians could be expected to write such an essay we do not know, but write it she did, and got very good marks: probably because the examiner had just about as little real sense of humour as the examinee.