old
herself, it belonged to the real Anne Leavitt, like Aunt Milly and
Nonie and the others, he must drop out of her life when she left Happy
House.

So that he might not even be missed by Davy and his cronies, Nancy
devoted one entire afternoon to teaching the boys of the club how to
build a fire without matches. When, after repeated and discouraging
failures, the last one had joyfully succeeded, Nancy had promised to
teach them to wig-wag at the very next meeting.

When Nancy returned to the house, flushed and tired from the hours on
the beach, old Jonathan, at the door, presented her with a half-blown
rose, its stem thrust through a folded sheet of paper.

"Mr. Peter, over to Judson's, asked me to give it t'you."

With a certain set of the college men and girls Nancy had been very
popular; more than once pretty tributes of flowers had come to her.
She had accepted them rather indifferently, had kept them with dutiful
care in water and had pasted the cards that had come with them in her
remembrance book. But this gift was different; it was quaint--and _so_
pretty!

"If you will meet me at seven in the orchard I will tell you a surprise
that will tickle you to pieces," Peter Hyde had scrawled across the
paper.

"How--_funny_!" laughed Nancy, reading and re-reading the lines. "What
can it be?"

If Nancy had asked herself why she sang as she dressed for supper she
would have thought, truthfully, that it _was_ because she was
ravenously hungry and B'lindy's supper smelled very good; and she chose
to wear, from her slender wardrobe, a pink organdy, because it would be
cool--_not_ that she even dreamed, for a moment, of doing such a silly
thing as going to the orchard at seven o'clock, to meet Peter Hyde!

A dozen times, during the evening meal, she resolved that Peter Hyde's
surprise could wait. He presumed, indeed, to think that, after he had
absented himself for so long without one little word of explanation,
she would go running at the crook of his little finger!

However, she put the pink rose in her belt and occasionally slipped it
out to smell of it. It was the most beautiful rose she had ever
seen--she must ask Jonathan its variety.

At five minutes of seven she picked up her knitting and sat resolutely
down between her aunts on the hollyhock porch. Just as Aunt Sabrina
was telling her how, back in 1776, Robert Leavitt had dined with
Benedict Arnold on the flagship of his little Champlain fleet, t