“Some leaves to make garlands for the social,” Polly answered more cheerfully. “Would you mind holding this?” She gave him one end of a string of leaves.
“Where are the children?”
“Gone home.”
“You like the children very much, don't you, Polly?” Douglas was striving for a path that might lead them to the subject that was troubling him.
“Oh, no, I don't LIKE them, I LOVE them.” She looked at him with tender eyes.
“You're the greatest baby of all.” A puzzled line came between his eyes as he studied her more closely. “And yet, you're not such a child, are you, Polly? You're quite grown up, almost a young lady.” He looked at her from a strange, unwelcome point of view. She was all of that as she sat at his feet, yearning and slender and fair, at the turning of her seventeenth year.
“I wonder how you would like to go way?” Her eyes met his in terror. “Away to a great school,” he added quickly, flinching from the very first hurt that he had inflicted; “where there are a lot of other young ladies.”
“Is it a place where you would be?” She looked up at him anxiously. She wondered if his “show” was about to “move on.”
“I'm afraid not,” Douglas answered, smiling in spite of his heavy heart.
“I wouldn't like any place without you,” she said decidedly, and seemed to consider the subject dismissed.