“Yes, darling, as soon as it opens for the term,” Gale said.
To their surprise his lip puckered and he flung himself on Gale, hiding his face on her shoulder with a smothered sob. Across his blond head, Gale and Virginia exchanged a smiling glance, tears not far from the surface of either pair of clear eyes.
“Bobby,” Gale murmured, “aren’t you glad? Don’t you want to go to school?”
“Course I do,” he said, choking, “t-that’s why I’m cryin’.”
“Gosh,” Carol said when the girls rode away, leaving an ecstatic, beaming Bobby behind them. “I never knew it was so nice to play Santa Claus. We’ll have to do it often,” she said slyly tucking her handkerchief back into her pocket.
“I’m so glad you suggested giving the money to Bobby, Gale,” Val said, a suspicious thickness in her voice.
“So am I,” Janet declared, “but hang it all, I almost cried with him.”
“I guess we never realized before how fortunate we were,” Phyllis said, contemplating the blue sky overhead. “Didn’t it do something to you just now? I feel all sort of big inside. Like--like I wanted to be nice to everybody in the world.”
“It does make you happy just to make somebody else happy,” Madge agreed. “He is such a cunning little chap.”
“And worthy of anything we might do for him,” Virginia declared. “His mother has raised him with the best manners of any youngster in Arizona.”