“Please tell me whether two and seven make six or eleven, Jim,” said she.
“They make nine,” said Jim.
“I have been counting my fingers and I got it eleven, but I suppose I must have counted one finger twice,” said little Lucy. She gazed reflectively at her little baby-hands. A tiny ring with a blue stone shone on one finger.
“I will give you a ring, you know,” Jim said, coaxingly.
“I have got a ring my father gave me. Did you say it was ten, please, Jim?”
“Nine,” gasped Jim.
“All the way I can remember,” said little Lucy, “is for you to pick just so many leaves off the hedge, and I will tie them in my handkerchief, and just before I have to say my lesson I will count those leaves.”
Jim obediently picked nine leaves from the hawthorn hedge, and little Lucy tied them into her handkerchief, and then the Japanese gong sounded and they went back to school.
That night after dinner, just before Lucy went to bed, she spoke of her own accord to her father and Miss Martha, a thing which she seldom did. “Jim Patterson asked me to marry him when I asked him what seven and two made in my arithmetic lesson,” said she. She looked with the loveliest round eyes of innocence first at her father, then at Miss Martha. Cyril Rose gasped and laid down his newspaper.
“What did you say, little Lucy?” he asked.