“I say, if you please, is your name Polly Milton?” meekly asked Tom, pausing before the breezy stranger.
“No, it isn’t,” answered the young lady, with a cool stare that utterly quenched him.
“Where in thunder is she?” growled Tom, walking off in high dudgeon. The quick tap of feet behind him made him turn in time to see a fresh-faced little girl running down the long station, and looking as if she rather liked it. As she smiled, and waved her bag at him, he stopped and waited for her, saying to himself, “Hullo! I wonder if that’s Polly?”
Up came the little girl, with her hand out, and a half-shy, half-merry look in her blue eyes, as she said, inquiringly, “This is Tom, isn’t it?”
“Yes. How did you know?” and Tom got over the ordeal of hand-shaking without thinking of it, he was so surprised.
“Oh, Fan told me you’d got curly hair and a funny nose, and kept whistling, and wore a gray cap pulled over your eyes; so I knew you directly.” And Polly nodded at him in the most friendly manner, having politely refrained from calling the hair “red,” the nose “a pug,” and the cap “old.”
“Where are your trunks?” asked Tom, as he was reminded of his duty by her handing him the bag, which he had not offered to take.
“Father told me not to wait for any one, else I’d lose my chance of a hack; so I gave my check to a man, and there he is with my trunk;” and Polly walked off after her one modest piece of baggage, followed by Tom, who felt a trifle depressed by his own remissness in polite attentions.
Louisa M. Alcott.