“Don’t you, my dear?” he asked politely.  “Then permit me to say that I do.”

Martie sat dumb with despair.

“Certainly Martha may go, if Leonard and one of her sisters go; not otherwise,” said Malcolm.  He retired to his library, and Martie had to ease her boiling heart by piling the dinner dishes viciously, and question no more.

However, she consoled herself, there was something rather dignified in this arrangement, after all; Len was presentable, and she was always the happier for being with Sally.  She washed her only gloves, pressed her suit, and spent every alternate minute during the next day anxiously inspecting her chin where an ugly pimple threatened to form.  The family was again at dinner when Len broached a change of plan.

“Can I go up to Wilson’s to-night, Pa?” he asked.  Martie flashed him a glance.

“I suppose so, for a little while,” Malcolm said tolerantly.  The girls looked at each other.

“But I thought you were going to the Opera House with us?” Martie exclaimed.

“Well, now you know I ain’t,” Len answered airily.

“I am not, Len,” corrected his mother.  Martie gave him a look of hate.

“Len says he promised to go to Wilson’s,” Lydia said placatingly.  “So I thought perhaps Sally and I would go with you—­I’m sorry, Martie!”

For Martie’s breast was heaving dangerously.

“Pa, didn’t you say Len was to go with us?” she asked with desperate calm.

“I said some one was to go,” Malcolm said, disapproving of her vehemence.  “I confess I cannot see why it must be Len!”

“Because—­because when a man asks a girl to go out with him he doesn’t ask the whole family!” Martie muttered in a fury.  Her lip trembled, and she got to her feet.  “It doesn’t matter in the least,” she said in a low, shaking voice, “because I am not going myself!”

Flashing from the room, she ran upstairs.  She flung herself across her bed, and cried stormily for ten minutes.  Then she grew calmer, and lay there crying quietly, and shaken by only an occasional long sob.  It was during this stage that Lydia came into the room, and sitting down beside Martie’s knees, patted her hand soothingly.  Lydia’s weak acceptance of the younger sister’s distaste for her company gave Martie a sort of shamed heart-sickness.

“Don’t!” said she huskily, jerking her arm away.

But Lydia was not to be rebuffed, and Martie was but nineteen, after all, and longing for the happiness she had denied.  An hour later, all the prettier for her tears, she met Rodney at the hall door, the boy making no sign of disappointment when Lydia and Sally joined them.

“But say, Martie,” he said at once, “I’ve got only the two seats!”

“Oh, that’s all right!” Lydia said quickly and cautiously.  “We don’t have to sit together!”

Martie’s mood brightened and she flushed like a rose when the boy said eagerly: