“Oh, you are very kind, Miss Susannah; but I fear you will find it a tax upon your time and patience.”
“Not at all. I shall have plenty of time, and little that is interesting to fill it up with. For let me tell you a secret. I intend to avail myself of the opportunity of your parents being in Washington to send my little Rosemary to the same school that Wynnette and Elva will attend.”
“Oh, that will be jolly!” “Oh, that will be lovely!” exclaimed Wynnette and Elva, in the same instant.
“That is, if Mr. and Mrs. Force will not consider the addition of Rosemary to their party an intrusion.”
“Why, Miss Susannah! How dare you slander my father and mother right before my two looking eyes?” exclaimed Wynnette. “They will be just set up to have Rosemary! Besides, where’s the intrusion, I’d like to know? The railroad and the hotel and the boarding school are just as free for you as for me, I should think.”
“Rosemary would board at the school, of course,” continued Miss Grandiere.
“So shall Elva and I. If papa could have got a furnished house we should have lived at home, and entered the academy as day pupils; but, you see, as papa could not get a house he and mamma and Odalite will live at one of the West End hotels, and Elva and I at the academy.”
“And, oh! won’t it be lovely to have dear Rosemary with us? We should not feel half so strange,” said little Elva.
“You will speak to your father and mother on the subject when you go home, Odalite, my child; and I will call on them later. If they will take charge of Rosemary on the journey, and enter her at the same school with yourselves, I will be at all the charges, of course, and I shall feel very much obliged,” said Miss Susannah.
“You may rest assured that papa and mamma will be very glad to take charge of dear little Rosemary; not only for her sake and for your sake, but for our sakes, so that we may have an old playmate from our own neighborhood to be our schoolmate in the new home,” said Wynnette.