Peggy threw herself right down on the ground and began sobbing. It was too wonderful—it was simply the wildest magic! Oh, how beautiful it was to have somebody like her so well and want her to be happy! Then as abruptly as she had cast herself down, she sprang up, and laughing and crying at once, she seized Mr. Huntington’s hand, and pumped it up and down, and clung to it and tried to talk and could not.
Jim turned his head away before her great joy and smiled quietly all by himself. She was such a flyaway sort of Peggy, tears one minute and laughter the next, and all the past and all the future were as nothing beside the present moment.
He was recalling all that he himself and the old man beside him owed to this same warm-hearted girl, and he felt that the debt was not nearly canceled by Parsons Court.
“Oh, Jim,” she was turning to him now, “a few minutes ago I was wicked enough to be almost sorry you saved me from that storm so long ago. But now, oh, Jim, I thank you now all over again for having saved me, so that I can be here now and have this lovely, lovely thing happen to me. How good people are to me! Oh, I must remember to be a regular angel to everybody I meet just to pay up for everybody’s always being so wonderful to me. Mr. Huntington, I love Parsons Court, and every house in it, and I’m so stingy I hate to rent any of them, but just want to come and live in them all myself, one after the other. But renting them means college, so please, Mr. Huntington, get me some tenants just as fast as you can,—and I never was so happy in my life, or didn’t ever expect to be!”
The old man’s face glowed with pleasure, and it was easy to see that he was as happy as Peggy.
If anyone ever walked on clouds that person was Peggy as she and her two friends made their way back toward Andrews. How brightly the sun shone! She knew it had never looked like that before. How beautiful everybody was—how everybody’s face was beaming as she passed, school children, old women, the men on the delivery wagons—all, all lit for her by a subtle glory that was spreading and spreading over the whole world. Her friends just laughed at her raptures, but it was an understanding laugh, and Peggy liked them for it. Was there anything at this minute, or anybody, that she didn’t like? Her heart was so full of happiness that she wished she might share it and share it until it was a little less full, so that it wouldn’t bubble over so uncontrollably.
She was only able to look up into Mr. Huntington’s face and smile for good-bye when they reached the Andrews gateway, and her glance then swept on to Jim, while the sunlight just poured itself down over the little group as they stood there together.
Then she turned and ran into the house as fast as she could go, running up the stairs to Katherine in the unladylike fashion of two at a time, and if it were possible to slide up banisters as well as down them Peggy would have slid up in order to get there quicker.
“Katherine! Katherine!” she cried, bursting in at the door, “I’m going, I’m going—it’s all magic, but it’s true and I’m going to Hampton!”
Katherine threw aside her schoolbooks and plunged across the room into her room-mate’s arms. “Oh, I’m so glad—Peggy!” she exclaimed joyfully.