“Thanks—so much! Then it’s a promise?”
“Certainly. A promise!”
They laughed again. The dogs leaped in the air and barked with delight. Everything and every one seemed happy to-day. Darsie felt that if she lived to be a hundred she could never, by any possibility, reach a higher pinnacle of content.
Chapter Sixteen.
After three Years.
“Is your trunk ready, Darsie? Are you ready to come down? Lunch is on the table and we’re all waiting. Have you fitted everything in? Oh dear, oh dear, how bleak and bare the room does look! I shall never have the heart to enter it after you’re gone.”
Clemence Garnett, aged twenty years, gave a pitiful glance round the dismantled room, which a few hours before had been decorated with the many and varied objects which were Darsie’s treasures. She looked at the wooden wardrobe, the doors of which swung wide, showing a row of empty pegs, at the scattering of paper and rejected ends of ribbon and lace which littered the floor, and finally back at the figure of Darsie herself, kneeling before the great black trunk, with her golden hair ruffling round a flushed, eager face.
“Sit on it, Clemence, like a lamb. It’s got to meet, but it’s inches apart still. Sit down with a flop, and be your heaviest, while I fight with the lock.”