“Not yet, Sidney. I wrote again, but I am mixed up about their itinerary, for it has changed. I keep hearing from them, and I think that they finally receive my mail, but all of it very late.”
“Let’s go down to the shore a while. I need to be with you, Shirley.”
Then the two, arm in arm and not saying a word, might stroll to the shore or off into the wood. Sidney refrained from suggesting a like unhappy fate for Shirley, yet her interest in knowing what word Shirley would have from Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt was plain. Shirley, for her part, never introduced a reference to Sidney’s woeful revelation, but if Sidney spoke of it, she would try to cheer her and she advised that Sidney tell Mr. and Mrs. Thorne, in order to know how they had come to adopt her. Sidney at first said that she was afraid to know, but later she was considering it.
Shirley determined not to cross the bridge before she came to it, but there was the awful possibility that she, too might have been adopted. Perhaps they were two stray little twins without anybody but each other. That consciousness and the odd feeling of kinship that she had toward Sidney made her very sympathetic. There was nothing the matter with Shirley’s imagination, though she tried to be sensible. Little Betty looked a little bit like her. Her brother had had the same combination of dark eyes and light hair. Oh, it simply could not be that she did not belong to her father and mother!
Nothing in Sidney’s life had been changed in the least, yet she was like a lost child in her heart. Finally she told Shirley that she would write about it to her father just as soon as the Prom was over. “I don’t think that I could bear any more and go through the Prom,” she said. “I’m going to make myself have a good time. Ran Roberts is the boy from our suburb that I like best. He is such a gentleman, too, and I want you to meet him. Then he is bringing some of his friends for some of the other girls who can’t ask anybody they know to come so far, so it will be a jolly lot of guests that we have. And if Mac comes, as Hope says, and your cousin Dick doesn’t fail you, we’ll all see that everybody has a fine time. Remember that I want you this time, Shirley. I suppose that I’ll always be proud, whether I have anything to be proud of or not,—” here Sidney laughed a little and Shirley’s eyes twinkled. “But I have learned a few things these awful weeks and one of them is to be sincere with myself and face the facts. For pity’s sake, remind me, Shirley, if I get on my high horse again.”
“Nothing of the sort,” firmly said Shirley. “A body has to have some self respect and your ‘superiority complex’ mustn’t go into total eclipse!”
“Aren’t you comforting?” smiled Sidney, “and you ought to be telling me what a snob I’ve been!”
“Hush and shush, as Madge says. I made up a new saying myself the other day, though not thinking about you.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a small potato that can’t grow an eye.”