“There! he’s all fixed, and is sure to have a good time with Ethel and Lou; they’re not a team, but a four-in-hand. Now, come and have a dance with me, and then we’ll go off all by ourselves and have the cosiest time you ever dreamed of. I feel so proud to have you all to myself,” she added, as they glided away to the soft strains of the music, “so sort of grown-up and grand with such a handsome partner.”
“Hear! hear! Do you want to make me vain? I haven’t been accustomed to hearing such barefaced compliments. They make me blush.”
“I really believe they do,” answered Toinette, throwing back her head to get a better look at him, and laughing softly when she saw a slight flush upon his face. “Never mind, it is all in the family, you know.”
“Perhaps I have other reasons for feeling a trifle elated,” he said, as the dance came to an end and he followed Toinette to one of the cozy corners. Springing up among the cushions, she patted them invitingly, and said:
“Come, sit down here beside me, and let me tell you all about the loveliest time of my life. Oh, daddy, I do so love to be here, and you don’t know how good Miss Preston is to me. She is good to us all, but, somehow the other girls don’t seem to need so much setting straight as I have. I think I must have been all kinked up in little hard knots before I came here, and Miss Preston has begun to untie them. She hasn’t got all untied yet, but I feel so sort of loosened up and easy that everything seems lots more comfortable.”
“I FEEL SO SORT OF GROWN UP AND GRAND.”
Clayton Reeve did not smile at Toinette’s odd way of explaining her feelings. He knew it to be a fourteen-year-old girl who spoke, and that her thoughts, to be natural, must be put into her own words.