“That we’ll turn over to Dotty. We can’t very well take it with us.”
“Oh, Daddy, it will kill me!” and Dolly flung herself into her father’s arms in a paroxysm of weeping.
“There, there, dear little girl, it is terribly hard, I know. But try to bear it, my darling little daughter. I’ll do anything I can for you, to make up. Perhaps you can have another Treasure House in Buffalo. But not unless we’re fairly sure of staying there permanently.”
“Oh, I don’t want another Treasure House! Nor another Dotty! I just want this House and this Dotty! Oh, I can’t stand it!”
It was a long time before they could quiet the nervous and heartbroken child. At last, quite worn out, she went to bed, but not to sleep. She lay there, “thinking it out.”
“I must manage it somehow,” she kept saying to herself. “There’s Bernice, she could keep us here by a single word to her father, and she won’t do it. I’ve done all I possibly can to make her popular, what more could I do? It seems so silly to have my whole life’s happiness hang on the word of that girl! But if it does hang there, why can’t I pick it off? Why, oh, why?”
Tossing and tumbling in her little white bed, Dolly put in an awful night. At last one little forlorn hope came to her.
“If I can do that,” she thought, seeing a tiny ray of hope, “Bernice will surely agree that I have kept my part of the bargain.”
She thought and thought. She planned and planned.
At last, though it was two o’clock in the morning, she jumped out of bed and throwing on her dressing-gown, sat at her desk and wrote a long letter to Bert and another to Bob Rose.