Miss Beatrice Compton returned to her buckboard a captive to Polly.
“She’s the sweetest thing,” she told her mother, who chanced to be her passenger on this occasion. “She’s got eyes and hair exactly of a colour, a sort of reddish brown, and her eyes twinkle at you in the dearest way, and she wears her hair in the quaintest pug, just in the right place on her head, sort of up in the air; and she’s a lady, too; anybody can see that. I wonder who ‘Dan’ is; you don’t suppose she’s married, do you?”
“You can’t tell,” Mrs. Compton replied. “Persons in that walk of life marry very young.”
“But, Mamma, she isn’t a ‘person,’ and she doesn’t belong to ‘that walk of life.’ She’s a lady.”
Miss Beatrice was as good as her word, 165 and three days had not passed when a horseman stopped before the little cottage, sprang from his horse, and looked about for a place to tie; there was no hitching-post near by. Polly was sitting in the porch making buttonholes.
“If you were coming in here, you’d better lead him right up the walk,” she said, “and tie him to the porch-post.”
“That’s a good idea!” the young man replied, promptly acting upon the advice. “You are Miss Polly Fitch, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“I knew you the minute I saw you, because Miss Compton described you to me.” This was meant to be very flattering, but Polly, who seldom missed a point, was quite unconscious that one had been made.
“Have you come for an idea?” she asked, quite innocently, and Mr. Reginald Axton, who was rather sensitive, wondered whether she “meant anything.” On second thoughts he concluded that she did not, and he began again: