"And I'll have enough clothes to last me for years, shan't I, mother?"
"I hope so, darling. Your father and I have done the best that we could for you."
"You've been angels. Oh, how I shall hate to leave you!"
"If only you weren't going away, Jinny!" Then she broke down, and dropping the tomato-shaped pin-cushion she had been holding, she slipped from the room, while Virginia thrust the polonaise into Miss Willy's hands and fled breathlessly after her.
In the girl's room, with her head bowed on the top of the little bookcase, above those thin rows of fiction, Mrs. Pendleton was weeping almost wildly over the coming separation. She, who had not thought of herself for thirty years, had suddenly broken the constraint of the long habit. Yet it was characteristic of her, that even now her first feeling, when Virginia found her, should be one of shame that she had clouded for an instant the girl's happiness.
"It is nothing, darling. I have a little headache, and—oh, Jinny! Jinny!—--"
"Mother, it won't be long. We are coming back to live just as soon as Oliver can get work. It isn't as if I were going for good, is it? And I'll write you every day—every single day. Mother, dearest, darling mother, I can't stay away from you——"
Then Virginia wept, too, and Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own sorrow at sight of the girl's tears, began to comfort her.
"Of course, you'll write and tell me everything. It will be almost as if I were with you."
"And you love Oliver, don't you, mother?"