“—that little girls grow up. They do.”
“You can’t be more than fourteen—or fifteen,” he charged, trying to escape from his mistake.
“I’m going on seventeen, sir,” she said demurely.
“Your letter——”
“—was from a little girl to whom you sent a nigger doll.”
“You said in it——”
“I said thank you for the doll. Wasn’t it a proper letter for a little girl to write to a kind gentleman?”
She asked it with a manner of naïve innocence, hardly a hint of mirth in the dark, long-lashed eyes meeting his so directly.
Mollie laughed. “She wrote and asked us not to tell you she had grown up, Hugh. We wondered when you would guess she wasn’t any longer a child.”
“I’ve been several kinds of an idiot in my time, but this—this takes the cake,” Hugh said ruefully.