“Why, your gr—I mean a friend of mine and Katherine’s,” finished she lamely.
“And some oil wells figured in his history, too?” the boy wanted to know. “You seem to be in everybody’s confidence, Peggy, though I must say I don’t myself see what there is about you to make people suppose you’d sympathize with them—when you sit there and beam as happily through their tragedies as if they were telling you about a picnic.”
“I’m sorry—” breathed Peggy, and a real hurt crept into her voice.
Just at this minute Katherine came into the room again, her tears dried and the lines of unhappiness smoothed out of her forehead. She sat down gracefully and tried to appear at ease, as if nothing had happened. Both Peggy and Jim wondered at the self-control she displayed in making a reappearance after her grief-stricken exit, but they could not know that Mrs. Forest had tiptoed up to her room and compelled the poor child to come down again, saying that it was a terrible and foolish breach of manners for her to have left in any such silly way, and that the only way she could atone for it was to go down and think how much better it would have been if she had behaved sensibly in the first place.
So Katherine made a few polite remarks, all the time wondering what Peggy’s happy air meant, and thinking her very shallow indeed to be able to recover so quickly from so bitter a disappointment as they had just been through.
“I wonder?” she heard Peggy say, to her increasing astonishment, “would you think it very queer if I asked you to come right over to Mr. Huntington’s with us for a few minutes? Your story and his are certainly an awfully unusual coincidence, if they aren’t something more. By that I mean, if they aren’t one and the same story. And since you said your middle initial didn’t stand for anything that you were aware of, mightn’t it stand for Huntington?”
“My mother gave my name in at school as James H. Smith, that’s all I know about that part. I usually sign it Holliday, because I like that name. It might be Huntington. Of course I’ll go and see this old man with you, if that’s the way you’d rather spend the afternoon.”
[CHAPTER XII—THE MEETING]
They could see Mr. Huntington sitting in the library, reading, as they came up the snowy walk. The room looked warm and peaceful and there was a contented expression on his face as his white head bowed over the book.
The wind was howling around them and it slapped the tattered remnants of vines against the porch as it had done on that first day Peggy worked her daring heart into a state courageous enough to carry her to the very door of Gloomy House. Inside, in contrast to the bluster without, the library looked as cozy and homelike as a room could well be when only one person lives in it.