“We have to go alone,” corrected her father laughingly. “Will has his business to attend to, and Nan has to stay and look after Will, and Little Sister has to stay and look after Nan. Don’t you, Little Sister?”
The smallest sister nodded solemnly. “Nan would be awful lonesome if I wented wif you,” she explained with an air of great importance.
“But if Betty wasn’t in college we’d take her,” went on Mr. Wales, “and she could pick oranges and grape-fruits, and sit under spreading palm-trees, and shin up the trunks for cocoanuts, and pick roses in January and——”
“Don’t!” begged Betty. “Please don’t! It sounds just too lovely for anything. Promise to take me the first winter after I’m through college.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” teased her father. “I don’t take a vacation every winter, you know. The last one I had was—let me see—twenty years ago, Miss Betty. So you may have to wait twenty years more if you don’t seize your chance and go now.”
“Father,” said Betty severely, “you know you wouldn’t think much of me if I should give up college in my junior year—even to pick you roses and oranges in the West Indies.”
“No,” said Mr. Wales, “I shouldn’t. I’m glad that all my children are the sort that stick to whatever they undertake. It pays in the end—and perhaps I can manage another vacation in—say ten years, Betty.”
“Thank you,” said Betty demurely, planting a kiss on his forehead and running off to see if Will was ready to go skating with the merry crowd of boys and girls who were just turning in at the front gate.
In the midst of all these Christmas excitements it is small wonder that Betty forgot Georgia. She entertained the family at breakfast one morning with an account of her lively adventures, and amused herself by putting Georgia’s picture among her Christmas gifts and listening to the varied comments of her Cleveland friends, who were much attracted by Georgia’s appearance. The men particularly called her “stunning” and “a good looker,” and inquired anxiously when she was coming to visit Betty. And Betty laughed and promised to have her “as soon as she could,” thinking what fun she would have at Easter, laughing at them for getting so excited over a composite photograph.