“I suppose so; it would, you know. I’d change with Fred, spine and all, to feel so,—I know that. Well, I’d change with him anyway, if I could, and he’d like it; but you can’t make yourself feel, can you?”
“Wouldn’t you just as soon leave the feeling to other people, sometimes?” asked Miss Dare, relapsing into frivolity without the slightest warning. “Never mind, Louis, if he does take her abroad to get her out of your way; fathers are not always as clever as they think themselves, and I won’t let her forget you.”
“I think she hardly could,” returned the boy, with a troubled smile; “we have known each other all our lives.”
“Well, here she comes, and I’ll do as I would be done by, and make myself scarce. That’s a Christian maxim, anyway.”
Louis turned quickly to meet his friend, with an eager face. “I could not come,” he said, “I was kept—but you have it? he gave it to you?”
Pinkie glanced down at a tile she carried in her hand. “Yes, he gave it to me,” she said.
“But I want to ask you, Pinkie—oh! I ought to say Miss Rose, but I’ve called you Pinkie all my life;—she says, Miss Dare says, that your father will take you to Paris to get you away from me. Pinkie, do you want to go?”
“That’s all Virgie’s nonsense,” said Pinkie decidedly; “he’d better not play stern parent, and he knows it. Yes, Louis, I do want to go; to see the ocean, and Paris, and all. Of course I want to go.”
“If you would enjoy it,” said Louis reluctantly, “we would try to bear it, Freddy and I. But we should miss you, Pinkie, liebes Herz,” he added tenderly.
“Well, you know I’d be back in two years,” said Pinkie, blushing slightly, though really it was hardly worth while to blush for Louis; a mere child, and a shoemaker at that.