Mr. Pendleton laughed.

“Well, from my remembrance of your aunt, Miss Pollyanna, I must say I think it would take something more than a few prisms in the sunlight to—­to make her bang many doors—­for gladness.  But come, now, really, what do you mean?”

Pollyanna stared slightly; then she drew a long breath.

“Oh, I forgot.  You don’t know about the game.  I remember now.”

“Suppose you tell me, then.”

And this time Pollyanna told him.  She told him the whole thing from the very first—­from the crutches that should have been a doll.  As she talked, she did not look at his face.  Her rapt eyes were still on the dancing flecks of color from the prism pendants swaying in the sunlit window.

“And that’s all,” she sighed, when she had finished.  “And now you know why I said the sun was trying to play it—­that game.”

For a moment there was silence.  Then a low voice from the bed said unsteadily: 

“Perhaps; but I’m thinking that the very finest prism of them all is yourself, Pollyanna.”

“Oh, but I don’t show beautiful red and green and purple when the sun shines through me, Mr. Pendleton!”

“Don’t you?” smiled the man.  And Pollyanna, looking into his face, wondered why there were tears in his eyes.

“No,” she said.  Then, after a minute she added mournfully:  “I’m afraid, Mr. Pendleton, the sun doesn’t make anything but freckles out of me.  Aunt Polly says it does make them!”

The man laughed a little; and again Pollyanna looked at him:  the laugh had sounded almost like a sob.

CHAPTER XIX.  WHICH IS SOMEWHAT SURPRISING

Pollyanna entered school in September.  Preliminary examinations showed that she was well advanced for a girl of her years, and she was soon a happy member of a class of girls and boys her own age.

School, in some ways, was a surprise to Pollyanna; and Pollyanna, certainly, in many ways, was very much of a surprise to school.  They were soon on the best of terms, however, and to her aunt Pollyanna confessed that going to school was living, after all—­though she had had her doubts before.

In spite of her delight in her new work, Pollyanna did not forget her old friends.  True, she could not give them quite so much time now, of course; but she gave them what time she could.  Perhaps John Pendleton, of them all, however, was the most dissatisfied.

One Saturday afternoon he spoke to her about it.

“See here, Pollyanna, how would you like to come and live with me?” he asked, a little impatiently.  “I don’t see anything of you, nowadays.”

Pollyanna laughed—­Mr. Pendleton was such a funny man!

“I thought you didn’t like to have folks ’round,” she said.

He made a wry face.

“Oh, but that was before you taught me to play that wonderful game of yours.  Now I’m glad to be waited on, hand and foot!  Never mind, I’ll be on my own two feet yet, one of these days; then I’ll see who steps around,” he finished, picking up one of the crutches at his side and shaking it playfully at the little girl.  They were sitting in the great library to-day.