“Come right up to my room! I’ve got something lovely to tell you!”
Leonora’s face was so radiant that Polly was all at once reminded of that morning at the hospital when she had first heard of her friend’s adoption. What could have happened now to make her look like that?
“Say,” began Leonora, bubbling with news, “Colonel Gresham and David and his mother are here!”
Polly’s eyes grew big, and her lips puckered into a “Why!” of astonishment.
“And, oh, there’s lots more!” went on Leonora mysteriously. “But I’m not to tell! I promised mother I wouldn’t—only just that. You’d know it anyway when you go down. Oh, Polly Dudley, I’m so tickled—there! mother told me not to say that word again!—well, happy, I mean, only it doesn’t sound so perfectly splendid as I feel. It seems as if I couldn’t stand it!”
“I can’t imagine what it is,” mused Polly wonderingly.
At which Leonora whirled her round and round in a rapturous hug, stopping suddenly to say they must go downstairs.
After Polly had greeted her hostess and the other guests, she found that a conversation was going on about the hospital.
“Yes,” the Doctor was saying, “we need more room, especially for children. We had to refuse two little girls yesterday and a boy the day before; there was absolutely no place where we could put them.”
“Then you think there is demand for a children’s hospital in the city?” asked Mrs. Jocelyn tentatively.