He took but little notice of her, and he generally brought a friend 3 home with him from school. He was getting beyond the "boy" stage, and developing a wholesome contempt for girls as a whole!
When—later—he went to a public school, he forgot to ignore her, and took to patronizing her instead. She wasn't such a bad little thing, he told her, and next term if she liked she might knit him a tie.
Marie knitted him two—which he never wore! She would have blacked his boots for him if he had expressed the slightest wish for her to do so.
Then, later still, he went to Cambridge and forgot all about her. He hardly ever came home during vacation save for week-ends; he had so many friends, it seemed, and was in great demand amongst them all.
Marie could quite believe it. She was bitterly jealous of these unknown friends, and incidentally of the sisters which she was sure some of them must have!
She was still at school herself, and her soft brown hair was tied in a pigtail with a large bow at the end.
"You'll soon have to put your hair up if you grow so fast, Marie," Miss Chester said to her rather sadly, when at the end of one term she came home.
Marie glanced at herself in the glass. She was tall and slim for her age, which was not quite seventeen, and as she was entirely free from conceit she could see no beauty in her pale face and dark eyes, which, together with her name of Marie Celeste, she had inherited from her French mother.
"Am I like mother, Auntie Madge?" she asked, and Miss Chester smiled as she answered:
"You have your mother's eyes."