Peggy was as good as her word. As postponement was never one of her weaknesses, she saw Miss Burns the following day, and the faded little spinster shed tears as she discussed Myrtle's future.
"Of course I know she ought to go on through high school," she sobbed. "She's been at the head of her class right up through the grades, and if she could finish high school, she wouldn't need to ask any odds of anybody. But I've laid awake night after night thinking, and I can't see my way to do it."
"If you had a little help, Miss Burns, I suppose you could manage, couldn't you? What is the very least you could get along on and let Myrtle stay in school?"
"Why she can't earn a great deal of course," said Miss Burns, wiping her eyes. "She's not old enough for a sales-woman, and she's not strong enough for any hard work, and she don't know anything about stenography."
"And what is the very least you think you could take in place of having Myrtle go to work?"
Miss Burns was one of the people who have a constitutional aversion to answering a direct question, but Peggy's persistence left her no loop-hole of escape. Cornered at last, she expressed the opinion that she could do with a hundred dollars. For some reason not quite clear in her own mind, Peggy had hoped it might be less, and her face showed her disappointment. "You think that is the very least you could get along on, Miss Burns."
"I'm afraid it is, Miss Peggy. Maybe I should have said a hundred and fifty. Look at the price of coal."
"Oh, I know," Peggy agreed. "Well, perhaps something will come up so Myrtle won't have to leave school. I'm sure I hope so."
Peggy repeated the substance of her conversation with Miss Burns to her three chums that afternoon as they were on the way out to Amy's Aunt Phoebe's. For in their efforts to circumvent the high cost of living, the Friendly Terrace girls had begun making weekly or even semi-weekly visits to the country. The season had been a favorable one for all garden produce, but Mr. Frost was finding it difficult to get anything like the help he needed. The girls went out into the garden, picked and pulled what they wanted, paid a price which, compared with the charges in the retail markets, seemed extremely reasonable, and came home with loaded market baskets and a tinge of sunburn in their cheeks. The weekly saving paid their car-fare many times over, and the fact that they all were together lent a festive air to the enterprise.
Peggy's three friends listened silently to their story of her visit to Miss Burns. Peggy's generosity was always leading her to attempt things far too big for her. The girls had stood by her loyally in the matter of the French orphan, but there they drew the line. A second orphan was too much.