So the pleasant talk went on, until Miss Price carried her patient away to supper and rest.
Merry days followed. Polly, remembering the old Ilga and her few school friends, looked delightedly upon the popularity which this subdued, humbled girl was winning. Once such attention might have incited her to overbearing conduct; now it seemed only to make her fairly beam with good-fellowship and happiness. “And she actually loves father!” Polly would smilingly tell herself, secretly rejoicing in the fact; but she rarely spoke of the change even to Patricia. It was enough that the miracle had been wrought. It did not need to be passed about in words.
Although somewhat against his father’s wishes, Harold remained for the week which he had started to spend in Fair Harbor; but all his pleading could not make the grudging consent cover a longer time.
With tears in his eyes he bade Polly good-bye.
“If you were only going, too!” he whispered. “Come on, Polly—do!”
“Why, you know I can’t!” she returned, half laughingly, half sadly.
He muttered an exulting reply that she could not quite catch, and then the train came, and he was hustled away, leaving Polly to wonder what he had said.
“It was something about what he was going to do when he was grown up,” she mused. “I don’t see why he should talk of that now—and here!”
On her return to the hotel, she ran over to the croquet ground that skirted the opposite side of the road. A game was in progress, and for the time Harold faded into the past. Patricia being called to the house, Polly took her place, and she was driving a ball to the last stake when somebody cried out:—