“Not at all. I think it was just like you, Miss Milly, to do such a lovely thing. You are one of the most kind-hearted girls I know,—to beggars, I mean,—but the young men tell a different story. There’s poor Stacey Fitz Simmons. I saw him the other day and he was complaining bitterly of your hard-heartedness. He said you hardly spoke to him at Professor Fafalata’s costume dance.”
“How unfair! he was my partner in the minuet. What more could he ask?”
“There’s nothing mean about Stacey. He probably wanted you to dance all the other dances with him. I told him that he was a lucky young dog to be invited at all. Why did you leave me out?”
“I didn’t think that a grown-up gentleman, in society, would care for a little dance at a boarding-school, where he would only meet bread-and-butter school girls.”
“Oh! I’m too old, am I? Well, I must say you are complimentary. And it’s a fault that doesn’t decrease as time passes. Well, I shall tell Stacey that there’s hope for him. You only care for very young men. Why did you send back the tickets which he sent you for the Inter-scholastic Games! You nearly broke his heart. He has been training for the past six months simply and solely in the hope that you will see him win the mile run.”
“But I will see him. I wrote him that Adelaide’s brother, Jim, had already sent her tickets, which we should use, and as he might like to bestow his elsewhere, I returned them.”
“‘Bestow them elsewhere?’ Not he. Stacey is constant as the pole. He’s as loyal as he is thoroughbred. He was telling me about the serenade that the cadet band gave your school last year. Some girl let down a scrap basket from her window full of buttonhole bouquets. He wore one pinned to the breast of his uniform for a week because he thought you had a hand in it; and you never saw a fellow so cut up as he was when he heard last summer that you had nothing to do with it, and even slept sweetly through the entire serenade.”
“Stacey is too silly for anything. It is perfectly ridiculous for a little boy like him to talk that way.”
“Little boy—let me see, just how old is Stacey, anyway! About seventeen. Six months your senior, is he not? At what age should you say that one might fall quite seriously and sensibly in love?”
“Oh! not till one is twenty at least,” Milly answered quickly; but she blushed furiously while she spoke.