“A splint from the oven broom. You used to ask for one, and here ’tis.”
He knew what she meant, and opening the paper saw one of her dark curls.
“Thanks, Milly,” he said, with a lump in his throat. “I’ll keep it, and the peas, too, till you come back. When will that be?”
“I don’t know; next summer, most likely; though perhaps I shall stay away until I’m such a fine lady that you won’t know me. I’m to study with Allie’s governess and learn everything, so as to teach some time,” she said.
“Here’s the carriage,” Tom called round the corner, and kissing Charlie and Bessie and Tom, who did not resist her now, and crying on her mother’s neck, and wringing her father’s hard hand and saying good-bye to Hugh, she went out from the home where for many a long year she was not seen again.
CHAPTER III.
INCIDENTS OF FIFTEEN YEARS.
At first the inmates of the farm house missed the young girl sadly; but they gradually learned to get on very well without her, and when in the spring word came that Mrs. Thornton was going to Europe and wished to take Mildred with her, offering as an inducement a sum far beyond what they knew the girl’s services were worth, and when Mildred, too, joined her entreaties with Mrs. Thornton’s, telling of the advantage the foreign life would be to her, as she was to share in Alice’s instruction, the father and mother consented, with no thought, however, that she would not return within the year. When Hugh heard of it he went alone into the woods, and sitting down near the chestnut tree, where he and Milly had often gathered the brown nuts together, thought the matter out in his plain, practical way.
“That ends it with Milly,” he said. “Europe will turn her head, and if she ever comes home she will despise us more than ever and me most of all, with my gawky manners and big hands and feet.”
Then, taking from his pocket a little box, he opened it carefully, and removing a fold of paper looked wistfully at the contents. A curl of dark-brown hair and a gray pod with two peas inside,—one shriveled and harder than the other, and as it seemed to him harder and more shriveled than when he last looked at it.
“It’s just as I thought it would be,” he said, “She will grow away from me with her French and German and foreign ways, unless I grow with her,” and for the first time in his life Hugh felt the stirring of a genuine and laudable ambition. “I will make something of myself,” he said. “I have it in me, I know.”