“If you think it is so ‘jolly,’” said Mrs. Oliver, “how would you like to come here and live with us awhile?”

This was a bombshell.  The boy hesitated naturally, being taken quite by surprise. ("Confound it!” he thought rapidly, “how shall I get out of this scrape without being impolite!  They would n’t give me one night out a week if I came!”) “I ’d like it immensely, you know,” he said aloud, “and it’s awfully kind of you to propose it, and I appreciate it, but I don’t think—­I don’t see, that is, how I could come, Mrs. Oliver.  In the first place, I ’m quite sure my home people would dislike my intruding on your privacy; and then,—­well, you know I am out in the evening occasionally, and should n’t like to disturb you, besides, I ’m sure Miss Polly has her hands full now.”

“Of course you would be often out in the evening, though I don’t suppose you are a ‘midnight reveler.’  You would simply have a latch-key and go out and come in as you liked.  Mrs. Howe’s room is very pleasant, as you know; and you could study there before your open fire, and join us when you felt like it.  Is it as convenient and pleasant for you to live on this side of the bay, and go back and forth?”

“Oh yes!  I don’t mind that part of it.” ("This is worse than the Inquisition; I don’t know but that she will get me in spite of everything!”)

“Oh dear!” thought Mrs. Oliver, “he does n’t want to come; and I don’t want him to come, and I must urge him to come against his will.  How very disagreeable missionary work is, to be sure!  I sympathize with him, too.  He is afraid of petticoat government, and fears that he will lose some of his precious liberty.  If I had fifty children, I believe I should want them all girls.”

“Besides, dear Mrs. Oliver,” continued Edgar, after an awkward pause, “I don’t think you are strong enough to have me here.  I believe you ’re only proposing it for my good.  You know that I ’m in a forlorn students’ boarding-house, and you are anxious to give me ’all the comforts of a home’ for my blessed mother’s sake, regardless of your own discomforts.”

“Come here a moment and sit beside me on Polly’s footstool.  You were nearly three years old when Polly was born.  You were all staying with me that summer.  Did you know that you were my first boarders?  You were a tiny fellow in kilts, very much interested in the new baby, and very anxious to hold her.  I can see you now rocking the cradle as gravely as a man.  Polly has hard times and many sorrows before her, Edgar!  You are old enough to see that I cannot stay with her much longer.”

Edgar was too awed and too greatly moved to answer.

“I should be very glad to have you with us, both because I think we could in some degree take the place of your mother and Margery, and because I should be glad to feel that in any sudden emergency, which I do not in the least expect, we should have a near friend to lean upon ever so little.”