“I don’t want to think of it. What’s the matter with your Uncle James’s house when the quarantine’s lifted?”
“Nothing. But it has only just been put on.”
“And the tournament next week. You can’t miss that! Oh, Elliott!”
“I think,” remarked Elliott pensively, “there ought to be a home opened for girls whose fathers are in France.”
“Why,” asked Bess, gripped by a great idea, “why shouldn’t you come to us while your uncle’s house is quarantined?”
Why not, indeed? Elliott thought Bess a little slow in arriving at so obvious and satisfactory a solution of the whole difficulty, but she was properly reluctant about accepting in haste. “Wouldn’t that be too much trouble? Of course, it would be perfectly lovely for me, but what would your mother say?”
“Mother will love to have you!” Miss Royce spoke with conviction.
They spent the rest of the afternoon making plans and Elizabeth went home walking on air.
But Mother, alas! proved a stumbling-block. “That would be very nice,” she said, “very nice indeed; but Elliott Cameron has plenty of relatives. They will 21 make some arrangement among them. I should hardly feel at liberty to interfere with their plans.”