“How perfectly splendid that I didn’t go to Silvia Home’s luncheon party now!” cried Polly’s heart over and over between the lines.  “If I had, I should have missed dear Auntie’s home-coming, and Dicky’s.”  She glanced up with luminous eyes as she whirled the sheet.  Mrs. Chatterton, astonishing as it may seem, was actually smiling.

“It’s some comfort to hear you read,” she observed with a sigh of enjoyment, “because you enjoy it yourself.  I wouldn’t give a fig for anybody to try to do it.”

Polly felt like a guilty little thing to take this quietly, and she eased her conscience by being more glad that she was in that very room doing that very task.  And so the moments sped on.

Outside, Dick was holding high revel as every one revolved around him, the hero of the coasting accident, till the boy ran considerable danger from all the attention he was receiving.  But one glance and a smile from Mrs. Whitney brought him back to himself.

“Don’t talk any more about it,” he cried a trifle impatiently.  “I was a muff to stick on, when I knew we were going over.  Mamma, won’t you stop them?”

And she did.

“Do you know, Dicky and I have a secret to tell all of you good people.”  The color flew into her soft cheek, and her eyes beamed.

“Really, Marian,” said her father, whose hand had scarcely ceased patting Dick’s brown head since the boy’s home-coming, “you’ve grown young in Badgertown.  I never saw you look so well as you do to-day.”

Mrs. Whitney laughed and tossed him a gay little smile, that carried him back to the days when Marian King stood before him looking just so.

“Now listen, father, and all you good people, to my secret—­Dicky’s and mine; we are allowed to tell it now.  Papa Whitney sailed in the Servia, and he ought to be in to-day!”

A shout of joy greeted her announcement.  Polly, off in her prison, could hear the merry sounds, and her happy heart echoed them.  The misery of the past week, when she had been bearing an unatoned fault, seemed to drop away from her as she listened, and to say, “Life holds sunshine yet.”

Then a hush dropped upon the gay uproar.  She did not know that Dicky was proclaiming “Yes, and he is never, never going back again.  That is, unless he takes mamma and me, you know.”

Mrs. Chatterton turned suddenly upon the young figure.

“Do go!” She tossed an imperative command with her jeweled fingers.  “You have ceased to be amusing since your interest is all in the other room with that boy.”

Polly dashed the newspaper to the floor, and rushing impulsively across the room, threw herself, with no thought for the consequences, on her knees at Mrs. Chatterton’s chair.

“Oh—­oh!” she cried, the color flying up to the brown waves on her temples, “don’t send me off; then I shall know you never will forgive me.”

“Get up, do!” exclaimed Mrs. Chatterton, in disgust; “you are crushing my gown, and besides I hate scenes.”