They entered the side door of the boarding-house. Cecil pulled Lee down beside him on the stair.
“Oh, Lee,” he said in a high falsetto, “we’re going to-morrow. And I hate to go away and leave you. I do! I do!”
“Going to-morrow!” gasped Lee, “and without me!” She burst into a storm of tears, and Cecil forgot his manly pride and wept too.
“I wish I were grown,” sobbed Cecil. “And I won’t be for years. I’ve got to finish at Eton, and then I’ve got to go to Oxford. I’m only fifteen and one month. I won’t be my own master for six years, and I won’t be through Oxford when I am. It takes so beastly long to educate a fellow. It may be eight years before I see you again.”
“Eight years! I shall die. Why won’t he take me? I can pay for myself. Mrs. Hayne says I have eighty dollars a month. Don’t you think he’ll change his mind?”
“He won’t! he won’t!”
When Lee had wept herself dry, she adjusted herself to fate. “Well,” she said, with a heavy sigh, “we’ll write every week, won’t we?”
It was Cecil’s turn to be appalled. This was a phase of the tragedy that had not occurred to him.
“Oh, Lee,” he faltered, “I hate to write letters!”
“But you will?” she cried shrilly. “You will?”