“Miss Peggy,” said he, “don’t let’s quarrel.”

He held out his hand, and I gave him mine quickly.

“No,” said I, “I’m not quarrelling.”

“I want to ask you something,” said he.  “You must answer, truly.  If I have a friend and she’s doing something foolish, should I tell her?  Should I write to her brother and tell him?”

“Why,” said I, “do you mean me?” Then I understood.  “You think I’m not doing very well in my psychology,” I said.  “You think I’ve made a wrong choice.”  I looked at him then.  I never saw him look just so.  He had my hand, and now I took it away.  But he wouldn’t talk about the psychology.

“Peggy,” said he, “do your people know Goward?”

“They will in vacation,” I said.  “He’s going home with me.  We’re engaged, you know.”

“Oh!” said he.  “Oh!  Then it is true.  Let him meet Charles Edward at once, will you?  Tell Charles Edward I particularly want him to know Goward.”  His voice sounded sharp and quick, and he turned away and left me.  But I didn’t give his message to Charles Edward, and somehow, I don’t know why, I didn’t talk about him after I came home.  “Dane never wrote me whether he looked you up,” said Charles Edward one day.  “Not very civil of him.”  But even then I couldn’t tell him.  Mr. Dane is one of the people I never can talk about as if they were like everybody else.  Perhaps that is because he is so kind in a sort of intimate, beautiful way.  And when I went back after vacation he had resigned, and they said he had inherited some money and gone away, and after he went I never understood the psychology at all.  Mr. Goward used to laugh at me for taking it, only he said I could get honors in anything, my verbal memory is so good.  But I told him, and it is true, that the last part of the book is very dull.  While I was going over all this, still with that strange excited feeling of happiness, I heard Aunt Elizabeth’s voice from below.  She was calling, softly:  “Peggy!  Peggy!  Are you up there?”

I got on my feet just as quietly as I could, and slipped through mother’s room and down the back stairs.  Mother was in the vegetable garden watering the transplanted lettuce.  I ran out to her.  “Mother,” I said, “may I go over to Lorraine’s and spend the night?”

“Yes, lamb,” said mother.  That’s a good deal for mother to say.

“I’ll run over now,” I told her.  “I won’t stop to take anything.  Lorraine will give me a nightie.”

I went through the vegetable garden to the back gate and out into the street.  There I drew a long breath.  I don’t know what I thought Aunt Elizabeth could do to me, but I felt safe.  Then—­I could laugh at it all, because it seems as if I must have been sort of crazy that night—­I began to run as if I couldn’t get there fast enough.  But when I got to the steps I heard Lorraine laughing, and I stopped to listen to see whether any one was there.

“I tell Peter,” said she, “that it’s his opportunity.  Don’t you remember the Great Magician’s story of the man who was always afraid he should miss his opportunity?  And the opportunity came, and, sure enough, the man didn’t know it, and it slipped by.  Well, that mustn’t be Peter.”