“I must say I’m disappointed in that girl,” declared Peggy, absently smoothing out the crumpled paper. Her bright face was clouded. “Wednesday she was just as interested and ambitious as she could be. And now she’s given up. It doesn’t seem like her.”
“I must say she doesn’t show a great deal of gratitude,” exclaimed Ruth, always ready to rush to Peggy’s defence. “Here you’ve been using your vacation to teach her, when you might have been enjoying yourself, and then all at once she gets tired of it. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that if you were like most girls, you’d be the one to give up.”
The expression of Peggy’s face suggested that she was rather absorbed in her own thoughts, and giving but scant heed to the words of her champion.
“Do you know, girls,” she said slowly, “I’m going over to see Lucy and find out what this means.”
There was a chorus of protests. “Don’t you do it, Peggy,” Amy cried indignantly. And Priscilla remarked, “I wouldn’t tease her into accepting a kindness that she hadn’t the sense to appreciate.”
“It was too much for you to do anyway,” Ruth chimed in. “I think it’s a good thing she’s tired of it, myself.” But Peggy was not to be dissuaded from her purpose. Under the uncompromising statements of the bald little note, there was something that claimed her sympathy. Even the straggling lines, so little suggestive of the Lucy Haines she knew, carried the suggestion of appeal. “I’m not going to coax her into doing anything,” Peggy explained. “But–” and this with unmistakable firmness–“I’m going to find out.”
After dinner, when the other girls were indulging in afternoon naps, or lounging on the porch, Peggy donned a broad-brimmed shade hat, and with Hobo at her heels, started toward Lucy’s home. The zig-zag path crossing the pastures was both shorter and pleasanter than the road, and Peggy rather enjoyed getting the better of such obstacles as snake fences and brooks that must be crossed on stepping stones. Such things gave to an otherwise prosaic ramble the fine flavor of adventure.
She was flushed and warm, and looking, had she known it, unusually pretty, with her moist hair curling in rings about her forehead, when she came in sight of Lucy’s home, a straggling cottage which would have been improved by paint and the services of a carpenter. Both lacks were partially concealed by vines which climbed over its sagging porch, and tall rows of hollyhocks, generously screening with their showy beauty its weather-beaten sides. A girl was in the back yard chopping wood, a rather slatternly girl with disordered hair. Peggy descended on her briskly to ask if Lucy were at home.
Hatchet in hand, the girl faced about. Peggy’s head whirled. She made a confused effort to recall whether Lucy had ever mentioned a sister, a sister considerably older, and not nearly so nice. Then her momentary confusion passed, and she realized she was facing Lucy herself. The shock of her discovery showed in her voice as she exclaimed, “Why, it’s you!”
“Of course,” said Lucy a little coldly, but she cast a half-apologetic downward glance at her untidy dress, and her color rose. With obvious reluctance she asked, “Won’t you come in?”