“Oh, I’ll do it, of course; but I’m afraid.”

“You’ll soon get over that.  You see mother doesn’t write often, and father never does, and I’m often anxious about them, and if you write and tell me about them twice a month I shall be happier.  You see you are doing something for me.”

“Yes, thank you.  I’ll do the best I can.  But I can’t write like your cousin Helen,” she added, jealously.

“No matter.  You’ll do; and you will be growing older and constantly improving and I shall begin to travel for the house by and by and my letters will be as entertaining as a book of travels.”

“Will you write to me?  I didn’t think of that.”

“Goosie!” he laughed, giving her Linnet’s pet name.  “Certainly I will write as often as you do, and you mustn’t stop writing until your last letter has not been answered for a month.”

“I’ll remember,” said Marjorie, seriously.  “But I wish I could do something else.  Did you have to pay money for it?”

Marjorie was accustomed to “bartering” and that is the reason that she used the expression “pay money.”

“Well, yes, something,” he replied, pressing his lips together.

He was angry with the shoemaker about that bargain yet.

“How much?  I want to pay you.”

“Ladies never ask a gentleman such a question when they make them a present,” he said, laughing as he arose.  “Imagine Helen asking me how much I paid for the set of books I gave her on her birthday.”

The tears sprang to Marjorie’s eyes.  Had she done a dreadful thing that
Helen would not think of doing?

Long afterward she learned that he gave for the plate the ten dollars that his father gave him for a “vacation present.”

“Good-bye, Goosie, keep both promises and don’t run up a ladder again until you learn how to run down.”

But she could not speak yet for the choking in her throat.

“You have paid me twice over with those promises,” he said.  “I am glad you broke the old yellow pitcher.”

So was she even while her heart was aching.  Her fingers held the parcel tightly; what a hearts-ease it was!  It had brought her peace of mind that was worth more hard promises than she could think of making.

“He said his father’s great-grandfather had eaten out of that plate over in Holland and he had but one more left to bequeath to his little grandson.”

“I’m glad the great-grandfather didn’t break it,” said Marjorie.

Hollis would not disturb her serenity by remarking that the shoemaker might have added a century to the age of his possession; it looked two hundred years old, anyway.

“Good-bye, again, if you don’t get killed next time you fall you may live to see me again.  I’ll wear a linen coat and smell of cheese and smoke a pipe too long for me to light myself by that time—­when I come home from Germany.”

“Oh, don’t,” she exclaimed, in a startled voice.