"So you really think my sister will amount to something, Miss Pepper?"
He looked at her keenly.
Polly started. "Oh, yes, indeed! Why, she must, Mr. Loughead."
He laughed, and bit his moustache.
"And really, I don't think that Amy is quite understood," said Polly warmly, and forgetting herself; "if people believe in her, it makes her want to do things to please them."
"She says herself she has bothered you dreadfully," said Jack, with a vicious thrust of the walking-stick at his boot.
"She has a little," confessed Polly, "but not dreadfully. And I do think, Mr. Loughead, now that you have come, and that she sees how much you want her to study and practice, she will really do better. I do, indeed," said Polly earnestly.
Outside she could hear the "two boys," as she still called them, and Grandpapa's voice in animated consultation over the ways and means, she knew as well as if she were there, of spending the holidays, and it seemed as if she could never sit in the reception room another moment longer, but that she must fly out to them.
[Illustration: "OH!" SAID JACK LOUGHEAD. THEN HE TAPPED HIS BOOT WITH
HIS WALKING STICK.]
"Amy has no mother," said Jack Loughead after a moment, and he turned away his head, and pretended to look out of the window.
"I know it." Polly's heart leaped guiltily. Oh! how could she think of holidays and good times, while this poor little girl, but fifteen, had only a dreary sense of boarding-school life to mean home to her. "And oh! I do think," Polly hastened to say, and she clasped her hands as Phronsie would have done, "it has made all the difference in the world to her. And she does just lovely—so much better, I mean, than other girls would in her place. I do really, Mr. Loughead," repeated Polly.