The clock on Polly's mantel shelf was striking one long stroke. Hearing it Mrs. Wharton rose to leave the room, first pulling Polly up beside her. The girl was several inches taller than her mother.
"Polly dear," she said, "so far as Mollie is concerned I don't agree with the wisdom of your going away from home. But I want you to understand something else, something that I have never properly explained to you. It is not just narrowness or prejudice, this opposition of mine to your going upon the stage. You remember, dear, why your father left Ireland and came here to live in these New Hampshire hills. And you know you are not so strong as Mollie, and I used to be afraid that you had less judgment. Recently, however, you have seemed stronger and more poised. And I had almost decided before I came in to you tonight, that if in another year you are still sure that you wish to make the stage your profession, I shall not stand in the way of your giving it a fair trial. You don't know, but in your father's family not so many years ago there was a great actress. She ran away from home and her people never forgave her. I don't even know what became of her. Nothing like that must ever happen between you and me." Mrs. Wharton kissed Polly good night. "Have faith in me, dear, for I have understood the ambition and the heart-burning you have suffered better than you dreamed. I shall go to see Miss Adams again tomorrow. If you must try your wings some day, perhaps there could be no better beginning than that you should learn to know intimately one woman who has fought through most of the difficulties of one of the hardest professions in the world and has earned for herself the right kind of fame and fortune."
CHAPTER III
Farewells
Polly O'Neill was entertaining at a farewell reception. April had passed away and May and it was now the first week in June. In a few days more she would be sailing for Southampton with Miss Margaret Adams to be gone all summer. The party was not a large one, for Polly had preferred having only her most intimate friends together this afternoon.
So of course the old members of the Sunrise Hill Camp Fire Club were there and a few outside people, besides the group of young men who had always shared their good times.
Moreover, the past two years had given the old Camp Fire Club an entirely new distinction, since one of its girl members had recently married.
At this moment she was approaching Polly O'Neill, and Polly held out both hands in welcome, as she had not seen the newcomer since the return from her wedding journey. Edith Norton it was, who was dressed, as she had always hoped to be, in a costume that neither Betty nor Rose Dyer could have improved upon, a soft blue crêpe with a hat of the same color and a long feather curling about its brim. For Edith had confessed her fault to her employer soon after her difficulty in the last story and had been forgiven. And, as a good-by present to Betty Ashton, she had promised never to have anything more to do with the young man of whom her Camp Fire friends had disapproved. The result was that she had married one of the leading dry goods merchants in Woodford, and hard times and Edith were through with each other forever.
Now her cheeks were flushed with happiness instead of the color that she had used in the days before her membership in the Camp Fire Club, and her pretty light hair made a kind of halo about her face.