Adams and I do manage to
arrive in Germany."

Polly ended her speech in this fashion with the intention of making it
seem a trifle less impertinent. However, Anthony appeared not to have
understood her. Nevertheless, having been trained in a difficult school
in life perhaps he had the ability for not revealing his emotions on all
occasions.

For Herr Crippen and Mrs. Crippen, Betty's father and stepmother, were
at this moment trying to shake hands with him. Herr Crippen looked much
more prosperous and happy since his marriage to the girls' first Camp
Fire Guardian. He had now almost as many music pupils in Woodford as he
had time to teach, while Miss McMurtry had lost every single angular
curve that had once been supposed by the girls to proclaim her an old
maid for life and as Mrs. Crippen was growing almost as stout and
housewifely as a real German Frau.

In the interval after Anthony's desertion, as Mrs. and the Herr
Professor had already spent some time in talking with her, Polly found
herself alone.

She was a little tired and so glanced about her for a chair. Her mother
and Mollie were both in the dining room as well as Sylvia, who had come
home for a week to say farewell to her beloved step-sister. But before
Polly could locate a chair for herself, she observed that two were being
pushed toward her from opposite sides of the room. Therefore she waited,
smiling, to find out which should arrive first. Then she sank down into
the one that John Everett presented her, thanking Billy Webster for his,
which had arrived a second too late.

Excitement always added to Polly O'Neill's beauty, and so this afternoon
she was looking unusually pretty. As it was the month of June she wore a
white organdie dress with a bunch of red roses pinned at her belt and
one caught in the coiled braids of her dark hair.

She had been perfectly friendly with Billy, even more so than usual,
since their April talk. For having her own way made Polly delightfully
amiable to the whole world. Billy, however, had not responded to her
friendliness. He was still deeply opposed to her going away with Miss
Adams. And though he was doggedly determined to have his own will in the
end, he seemed to have lost all his former interest and pleasure in
being often at the Wharton home. For not only was Polly in what he
considered a seventh heaven of selfish happiness at her mother's change
of mind, but Mollie no longer treated him with her former intima