"You know I like your father, Annie, and didn't mean anything," and the boy looked very sorry that he had embarrassed his little friend.
"That's all right, Harvie, but you know——"
"Yes, I know," he said sympathetically. "Now come on and let's have some ice cream. Who are your special friends? Introduce me and I'll take them all."
Dum and Dee and Mary Flannigan and I were of course the chosen few, and as soon as Shorty had arranged so Mabel Binks could "take in" the ice cream, he joined us and a very merry time we had. We met many boys and liked most of them. They were a healthy, wholesome lot and almost as much fun as girls. Miss Cox joined us and let herself go with as much abandon as she had in the Lobster Quadrille.
I have never seen anyone so happy as Annie Pore. She and Harvie Price had been friends from the time they could walk. The boy had spent a great deal of his time with his grandfather at Price's Landing and the little English maid, whose father kept the country store, was the one white child in the neighborhood whom the proud old aristocratic General Price considered suitable to associate with his grandson.
"You ought to see Mr. Pore," Harvie confided to me. "I tell you he is a rare one. He is about the best educated man I ever met. Grandad says he can think in Latin. Be that as it may, he can certainly teach it. I had some lessons from him during one summer and have been grateful to him ever since. He is awfully English and just as strict with Annie as can be. Mrs. Pore was a beautiful woman and it seemed strangely incongruous to see her in the country store measuring calico and what not. Grandad used to say she looked like a Duchess at a Charity Bazaar. Nobody at Price's Landing ever has known what brought Mr. Pore to keeping a country store in a little Virginia village."
"Maybe thinking in Latin wasn't nourishing," I suggested.
"I fancy that was it," he laughed, "but why should an Oxford graduate keep a country store for a livelihood? There must have been other avenues open to him."
"Perhaps his beautiful wife discovered she had a genius for selling at Charity Bazaars, and when the time came to choose a profession, she chose what she had shown talent for as an amateur," I hazarded.
"Well, I see Miss Page Allison has some imagination and if she ever has to choose a profession it should be novel writing."