“That night when Stanley asked Polly Ann if he might see her home she said he could if he would give her a button off his waistcoat. It must have been hard for Stanley, for he knew he could never wear the waistcoat again if he did as she asked and that he couldn’t go with Polly Ann any more if he refused. He had no knife and he wouldn’t borrow one, so he just wrenched a button off and gave it to Polly Ann.
“When the girls went upstairs to put on their wraps, Polly Ann showed the button to them and they had lots of fun about it. The next morning Aggie told Stanley what Polly Ann had done and how every one was laughing at him.
“Stanley was at breakfast. There was no one in the kitchen but Stanley and Aggie and me, and they didn’t pay any attention to me. I remember how red Stanley’s face got when Aggie told him, and his chin, which had a dimple, seemed suddenly to get square like Father’s. I thought to myself that Polly Ann Nesbit had better look out, for, as Father often told us, ‘he who laughs last, laughs best.’ Stanley did get even with Polly Ann, though not in the way we thought he would.
“Before he went to work that morning he wrote her a letter and paid Charlie a quarter for taking it to her. Charlie told me that Polly Ann was in the front yard by herself when he gave her the letter and when she read it she just laughed and laughed, but that she put it in her pocket for safekeeping.
“Stanley was as nice as ever to her when they met, but he didn’t go to see her any more or take her buggy riding on Sunday afternoons. He took Mother or me instead, and I thought it very nice. Stanley went right ahead ploughing up his wheat field just as if nothing had happened, and when he got through with that he began to fix up a little cottage where brother Joe had lived for two years after he was married.
Polly Ann was in the front yard when Charlie gave her the letter