"There," said Rob, closing his knife and slipping it into his pocket. "I must go now."
As usual, Lloyd walked down to the gate with him. He whistled as he went, a musical, rollicking negro chorus, and she joined in with an accompaniment of little trills and calls, in clever imitation of a mocking-bird. But just before they reached the gate her whistling stopped. Her quick eyes spied a four-leafed clover in the grass, and she sprang forward to get it.
"And heah's anothah!" she cried, triumphantly. "One for you too, Rob. That means good luck for both of us. Put it in yoah pocket."
Rob took the little charm she held out, with a skeptical smile, yet he had imbibed too great a belief in such omens from his old coloured nurse not to regard it with respect. "Thanks," he said, "I have a safer place than my pocket. I'll need all the luck this or anything else can bring me in my Latin this year, so I'll carry it to every recitation." Opening the back of his watch he carefully smoothed the green petals and laid them inside, then closed the case with a snap. "Now I'm fixed," he said, with a nod of satisfaction.
At the gate they did not shake hands, but parted as they had done so many times before, as if they expected to begin their playtime on the morrow.
"Good-bye, Lloyd," was all he said, with a slight lifting of his cap as he walked away.
"Good-bye, Bobby," she answered. She stood for a moment shading her eyes from the sunset, with the hand that held the four-leafed clover, as she watched him go striding down the road toward Oaklea, switching with his tennis racket at the asters and goldenrod along his path. Then she went slowly back to the house, thinking how tall he looked as he strode away. As she passed the measuring-tree she looked up at the old locusts overhead, and sure of their sympathy, said, half-aloud, "Oh, I wish we didn't have to grow up!"