"I don’t believe it’s worth anything anyway," thought Peggy, glancing at
the sheet in her hand. Lurid sentences caught her eye. The ladies in
the narrative seemed given to shrieking and fainting, while the
gentlemen had a propensity for deadly combat. A sturdy strain of common
sense in Peggy’s make-up caused her lips to twitch over this cheap
tragedy.
"It sounds silly," was Peggy’s final verdict. "I don’t believe it’s
worth anything, but, after all, it belongs to somebody, and whoever
wrote it thinks it’s nice, I suppose. And--well, at the worst, she
can’t do more than shut the door in my face."
She marched down the yard, head up and shoulders back, in soldier
fashion. Indeed Peggy felt very much as if she were leading a charge.
Like most popular people, Peggy shrank from discourtesy. She was so
accustomed to being liked that any indication of unfriendliness came
with a sense of shock. The girl who had refused one neighborly kindness
in so unpleasant a fashion was not likely to have undergone a change of
heart in a little over twenty-four hours.
With a sense of bracing herself to face the worst, Peggy knocked at the
kitchen door and stood waiting. Elaine herself answered the summons.
The look which crossed her face seemed to say, "What, you here again?"
but Peggy did not wait for her to put the ungracious sentiment into
words.
"I don’t know whether this belongs to you or not," she said hastily,
"but I thought perhaps it did, because hardly anybody on the Terrace has
a typewriter." She handed the sheet to Elaine and prepared to back
away.
But Elaine’s formality had vanished with the understanding of Peggy’s
errand. "Page six," she exclaimed in tones of dismay, "O, I wonder
where the rest are."
"I didn’t see but this one, but then, I didn’t really look. When I came
out on the porch my little niece had it in her hand. She said an angel
brought it."
"An angel?" Elaine forgot her anxiety for a moment and laughed
outright; a little bubbling laugh which did wonders in advancing the
acquaintance of the two. Then her thoughts reverted to the paper, which
in Peggy’s opinion she prized unduly. "They must have blown out of one
of the upstairs windows," she exclaimed.
"Perhaps only that one blew out. You look upstairs, and I’ll see if
there are any more scattered over the grass," Peggy suggested
obligingly. As it happened, the search of both girls was successful.
Elaine came downstairs, her hands full of sheets she had gathered from
the floor, and out of the number only one proved to be missing. This
one, numbered four, Peggy had found winding itself about the trunk of a
spindling young peach tree in the front yard.
"Now let’s count them again and be sure they’re all here," Elaine said
eagerly. "One, two, three, four."
"Five, six, seven, eight," concluded Peggy. "That’s all, isn’t it?"
"Yes, that’s all. O, how lucky I am to find them."
"O, isn’t it splendid."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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