“I never would have thought I loved him if I hadn’t believed I’d lost you,” Peggy ruminated to herself.  “But I must think—­” As if she hadn’t thunk for an hour!

“How long must you think?” the doctor fired at her.

“Don’t be cross at me,” said she, like a baby, and that big capable man picked up her hand and kissed it—­shame on him!

“No, no, dear,” he said, as meek as pie.  “I’ll wait—­only you must decide the right way, and remember that I’m waiting, and that it’s hard.”

Then he put her into the cart clingingly—­I’d have chucked her—­and I leaned over toward him the last thing and threw my head lovingly on one side and rolled my eyes up and murmured at him, “Good-bye, Jack,” and started Hotspur before he could hit me.

Now, thank the stars, there’s just one or two little items more that I’ve got to write.  One is what I heard mother tell father when they were on the front piazza alone, and I was teaching the puppy to beg, right in sight of them on the grass.  They think I’m an earless freak, maybe.  She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she’d been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn’t marry a man she didn’t admire—­and wasn’t that noble of her?  Noble, your grandmother—­to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she’s got a real man up her sleeve!  I’d have made them sit up and take notice if I hadn’t promised not to tell.  Which reminds me that I ought to explain how I got Dr. Denbigh to let me write this for Lorraine.  I put it to him strongly, you see, about the cookies, and at first he said.

“Not on your life!  Not in a thousand years!” And then—­

But what’s the use of writing that?  Lorraine is on to all that.  But, my pickles! won’t there be a circus when Alice finds out that I’ve known things she didn’t!  Won’t Alice be hopping—­gee

XI.  PEGGY

by Alice Brown

“Remember,” said Charles Edward—­he had run in for a minute on his way home from the office where he has been clearing out his desk, “for good and all,” he tells us—­“remember, next week will see us out of this land of the free and home of the talkative.”  He meant our sailing.  I shall be glad to be with him and Lorraine.  “And whatever you do.  Peg, don’t talk, except to mother.  Talk to her all you want to.  Mother has the making of a woman in her.  If mother’d been a celibate, she’d have been, also, a peach.”

“But I don’t want to talk,” said I.  “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“Good for you,” said Charles Edward.  “Now I’ll run along.”