“Yes.  I had not meant to tell you, but perhaps it’s better, after all, that I do—­now.”  John Pendleton’s face had grown very white.  He was speaking with evident difficulty.  Pollyanna, her eyes wide and frightened, and her lips parted, was gazing at him fixedly.  “I loved your mother; but she—­didn’t love me.  And after a time she went away with—­your father.  I did not know until then how much I did—­care.  The whole world suddenly seemed to turn black under my fingers, and—­But, never mind.  For long years I have been a cross, crabbed, unlovable, unloved old man—­though I’m not nearly sixty, yet, Pollyanna.  Then, One day, like one of the prisms that you love so well, little girl, you danced into my life, and flecked my dreary old world with dashes of the purple and gold and scarlet of your own bright cheeriness.  I found out, after a time, who you were, and—­and I thought then I never wanted to see you again.  I didn’t want to be reminded of—­your mother.  But—­you know how that came out.  I just had to have you come.  And now I want you always.  Pollyanna, won’t you come now?”

“But, Mr. Pendleton, I—­There’s Aunt Polly!” Pollyanna’s eyes were blurred with tears.

The man made an impatient gesture.

“What about me?  How do you suppose I’m going to be ‘glad’ about anything—­without you?  Why, Pollyanna, it’s only since you came that I’ve been even half glad to live!  But if I had you for my own little girl, I’d be glad for—­anything; and I’d try to make you glad, too, my dear.  You shouldn’t have a wish ungratified.  All my money, to the last cent, should go to make you happy.”

Pollyanna looked shocked.

“Why, Mr. Pendleton, as if I’d let you spend it on me—­all that money you’ve saved for the heathen!”

A dull red came to the man’s face.  He started to speak, but Pollyanna was still talking.

“Besides, anybody with such a lot of money as you have doesn’t need me to make you glad about things.  You’re making other folks so glad giving them things that you just can’t help being glad yourself!  Why, look at those prisms you gave Mrs. Snow and me, and the gold piece you gave Nancy on her birthday, and—­”

“Yes, yes—­never mind about all that,” interrupted the man.  His face was very, very red now—­and no wonder, perhaps:  it was not for “giving things” that John Pendleton had been best known in the past.  “That’s all nonsense.  ’Twasn’t much, anyhow—­but what there was, was because of you.  You gave those things; not I!  Yes, you did,” he repeated, in answer to the shocked denial in her face.  “And that only goes to prove all the more how I need you, little girl,” he added, his voice softening into tender pleading once more.  “If ever, ever I am to play the ‘glad game,’ Pollyanna, you’ll have to come and play it with me.”

The little girl’s forehead puckered into a wistful frown.

“Aunt Polly has been so good to me,” she began; but the man interrupted her sharply.  The old irritability had come back to his face.  Impatience which would brook no opposition had been a part of John Pendleton’s nature too long to yield very easily now to restraint.