Polly’s answering sigh was one of relief. “I don’t seem to mind even that, although I was angry and frightened at first,” she returned. “I don’t usually enjoy doing what people make me do. But if you think you really would like to come to see me play, perhaps I should be rather glad. Only you must promise not to let me know when you are there, nor what you think of my acting afterwards.”
CHAPTER XIII—A Place of Memories
“I wonder, Angel, if you had ever heard of my friend, Polly O’Neill, before I mentioned her name to you?” Betty Ashton asked after a few moments of silence between the two girls, when evidently Betty had been puzzling over this same question.
Angel shook her head. “Never,” she returned quietly.
Five months had passed since their first meeting and now the scene about them was a very different one from the four bare walls of a hospital, and the little French girl was almost as completely changed.
It was early spring in the New Hampshire hills and the child and young woman were seated outside a cabin of logs with their eyes resting sometimes on a small lake before them, again on a dark group of pine trees, but more often on a sun-tipped hill ahead where the meadows seemed to lie down in green homage at her feet.
Everywhere there were signs of the earth’s eternal re-birth and re-building. The grain showed only a tiny hint of its autumn harvest of gold, but the grass, the flowers, the new leaves on the bushes and trees were at their gayest and loveliest. Notwithstanding there was a breeze cool enough to make warm clothes a necessity, and Betty wore a long dark blue cloth cloak, while her companion, who was lying at full length in a steamer chair, was covered with a heavy rug. Yet the girl’s delicate white hands were busily engaged in weaving long strands of bright-colored straws together.
“Why did you think I had ever heard of your friend, Princess?” she queried after a short pause.