“I ran to the front door, as marm had charged me to, and reached up for the knocker and gave it a good bang. And what should I see but the Square, instead of Mrs. Pomeroy that I was prepared for. He was tall and stern looking, and my ideas just fled away when I saw him, but I managed to remember my manners. I dropped a courtesy and said, ‘Please, marm wants Mrs. Pomeroy’s tea, and she’d be happy to have her compliments this afternoon.’”
“Then it came over me what I’d said, and with being scared and all I began to cry. And the Square just reached down and took my hand and led me into the house, and Mrs. Pomeroy understood the message right off, and said she’d be most happy to come. The Square kept hold of my hand all the time, and when the message was straightened out he said, ‘May I walk with you as far as our ways lie together, my little maid?’”
“Oh, wasn’t that beautiful!” cried Polly. “‘May I walk with you as far as our ways lie together, my little maid?’ That’s something like Mr. Shakespeare’s works that Uncle Blodgett has.”
“’Twas pretty fine talk, I think myself,” said Miss Green, “and ’twas followed up by finer, though I can’t recall anything else word for word. But we kept together hand in hand, he taking long strides and I running alongside, as you might say, till we reached a house where the Square had to stop. He took off his hat to me when he said good-bye and shook my hand, and said, ‘I beg you to accept this trifling remembrance, my little maid,’ and when I came to, there was a shining gold-piece in my hand.”
“‘I beg you to accept this trifling remembrance, my little maid,’” repeated Polly. “I think that’s even beautifuller than what he said at first. I guess Uncle Blodgett and Grandma Manser, too, would like to hear that. They love beautiful language.”
“When I got to school,” continued Arctura, after an appreciative smile at Polly, “John was in the middle of a group of children on the green. He’d taken off his coat and was showing ’em his first pair of ‘galluses’—bright red, they were, about the shade of this very yarn. One of the children ran up to me and said, ‘I suppose your brother John thinks he’s a man now, for he says his suspenders are just like your father’s.’”
“I never answered her, but I just opened out my palm to let her see the gold-piece, and I said, ‘The Square walked with me ’way to Mrs. Brown’s, and gave me this.’”
“John had considerable interest for the boys that day, but the girls were all taken up with me, and for weeks afterward when we got tired playing, somebody’d say, ‘Arctura, now you tell about your marm’s message, and the Square walking part way to school with you.’”
“Oh, I think it was ever so much more interesting than John’s suspenders,” said Polly, breathlessly. “I never heard anything so wonderful that happened to a little girl, Miss Arctura.”
Miss Green loosened the ruffle at her neck and slowly drew up a slender chain on the end of which something dangled.