The Admiral called in the hallway outside,
“Polly! Time’s up.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” answered Polly, promptly, and with a final pat on poor Crullers’ head, she caught up her cloak and the chafing-dish from the hall settee, and joined the Admiral at the door of the reception room.
Miss Calvert was standing beside him, and the tears came in her eyes as she looked at Polly, slender and sweet in her gown of softest white mull.
“I shall miss her this summer more than any of my girls, Admiral,” she said, half sadly. “She has done more this year towards giving the other girls the right point of view—”
“Now, Miss Honoria, I must insist that you stop filling Polly’s head with such ideas,” laughed the Admiral, his eyes twinkling proudly, as he bent over Miss Calvert’s hand with the old-time grace of a gentleman who could call Virginia his home state.
“Don’t you believe him, Miss Calvert,” Polly said severely. “He’s a great deal worse than you are. If it wasn’t for mother’s good, sensible, Massachusetts spirit in me, I’d be so puffed up that I’d blow away with the first strong breeze. But I do like to be praised, indeed, I do. I just love to be loved and appreciated.”
Miss Calvert kissed her, and stood in the doorway, as the two went down the broad steps from the veranda. The Admiral’s carriage was waiting, with old Balaam on the box, smiling till his face looked like a piece of shirred black satin. The Admiral handed Polly into the carriage as if she had been a duchess, and turned to bow once again to Miss Calvert.
“Isn’t she a dear?” said Polly, with a sigh of genuine comfort, as the carriage turned the corner, and the broad riverside road lay before them. “It doesn’t seem as though I had finished my Freshman year at school, grandfather.”
“Finished?” repeated the Admiral. “Why, bless my heart, girlie, you’ve just begun now. Three more years at the Hall, then four years in college, and then after that I rather think you and I will tramp around some rare old corners of this old world that I know of just to freshen up. And when you come back your aunts will make a society bud of you, and I shall lose my little messmate.”