Then it was that Mildred came again to his aid, saying to the Judge one day, “Oliver has learned all Miss Harcourt can teach him, and hadn’t you better be looking out for some good school, where he can be fitted for college?”
“Cool!” returned the Judge, tossing his cigar into the grass and smiling down upon her. “Cool, I declare. So you think I’d better fit him for college, hey?”
“Of course, I do,” answered Mildred; “you said you would that stormy day long ago, when I cried to go back and you wouldn’t let me.”
“So I did, so I did,” returned the Judge, adding that “he’d think about it.”
The result of this thinking Mildred readily foresaw, and she was not at all surprised when, a few days afterwards, the Judge said to her, “I have made arrangements for Clubs to go to Andover this fall, and if he behaves himself I shall send him to college, I guess; and,—come back here, you spitfire,” he cried, as he saw her bounding away with the good news to Oliver. But Mildred could not stay for more then. She must see Oliver, who could scarcely find words with which to express his gratitude to the man who, for Mildred’s sake, was doing so much for him.
Rapidly the autumn days stole on, until at last one September morning Mildred’s heart was sore with grief, and her eyes were red with weeping, for Oliver was gone and she was all alone.
“If you mourn so for Clubs, what do you think I shall do when you, too, go off to school?” said the Judge.
“Oh, I sha’n’t know enough to go this ever so long,” was Mildred’s answer, while the Judge, thinking how lonely the house would be without her, hoped it would be so; but in spite of his hopes, there came a day, just fourteen years after Mildred was left on the steps at Beechwood, when the Judge said to Oliver, who had come home, and was asking for his playmate:
“She’s gone to Charlestown Seminary, along with that Lilian Veille, Lawrence Thornton makes such a fuss about, and the Lord only knows how I’m going to live without her for the next miserable three years.”