But Mr. Morley shook his head, still without looking at her. Jo noticed his eyes looked heavy and bloodshot—as though he had not slept for a long time.
"You've got to have it," he said, almost bruskly. "I only wish I could make it ten times as much!"
Mr. Morley had admitted that could the absconding clerk, Andrew Simmer, be found and brought to justice, something might yet be saved from the threatened wreck of his business.
But Andrew Simmer was gone, "disappeared overnight," her mother had said, "as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up."
As each day with its excited preparations brought the three girls nearer to the opening of the boarding school and their departure for Laurelton, Jo caught the contagion of Sadie's and Nan's excitement and forgot to some extent the unhappiness at home.
At last the day before the great event arrived. Sadie and Nan had shopped steadily—Jo, too, to the limit of the thin little bank roll.
Miss Emma, sharing in the pleasurable excitement of the girls, would have supplied Jo with everything she needed, furnished her with a complete wardrobe, but here Mr. Morley resolutely drew the line.
"If Jo can't go with the clothes I can give her, then she cannot go at all," he said, and Jo assured him with tears in her eyes that she was perfectly content with what she had, that, indeed, she had not wanted to take anything even from him under the circumstances!
So it came to pass that Jo's trunk was packed long before Nan and Sadie had finished buying pretty things. Jo had steeled herself to do without a great many things that she had expected to have and could have had if it had not been for Andrew Simmer, rascal.
"I've a score to settle with that fellow," she thought vengefully. "If I should ever meet him!"