ding could not make the grudging consent cover a longer time.

With tears in his eyes he bade Polly good-bye.

"If you were only going, too!" he whispered. "Come on, Polly--do!"

"Why, you know I can't!" she returned, half laughingly, half sadly.

He muttered an exulting reply that she could not quite catch, and then
the train came, and he was hustled away, leaving Polly to wonder what
he had said.

"It was something about what he was going to do when he was grown up,"
she mused. "I don't see why he should talk of that now--and here!"

On her return to the hotel, she ran over to the croquet ground that
skirted the opposite side of the road. A game was in progress, and for
the time Harold faded into the past. Patricia being called to the
house, Polly took her place, and she was driving a ball to the last
stake when somebody cried out:--

"There's your cousin! What's he coming back for?"

Polly glanced up, to see Harold grinning and waving to her jubilantly.

He jumped from the car as it slowed, and came to meet her.

"How did you get here? I s'posed you were on the way to New York!"

"Had an accident," he answered cheerfully,--"just below the station,
and the track was so blocked up they said we couldn't get along in
hours. I wasn't going to stay fooling round there, you bet! I said,
wasn't there an auto somewhere that could bring us back to the hotel,
and a man asked me what hotel 'twas and all about it up here, and he
and another man said they'd get an auto if there was one to be had. So
they did--and here I am!"

He wagged his head gleefully.

"I never saw such a boy for pouncing in on people!" laughed Ilga. "But
I'm awfully glad you've come. Was there anybody hurt?"

"Yes, some of 'em. No one killed, they said. 'Twas a mighty big
smash-up, though! My! you'd 'a' thought the whole world was going to
pieces when we came together! And we hadn't been started much more'n
two minutes! Our car tilted over, and I climbed out through the
window! I didn't even get a scratch."

"Don't let's talk about it," begged Polly. "I'm so glad you aren't
hurt."

"Yes," agreed Harold; "but I'd 'a' come back here all the same if I
had been, and then pop would 'a' had to let me stay."

The children laughed, all but Polly. She said, with a little pucker of
the brows:--

"What a boy!"

Later, as they went up to the hotel, she glanced towards the broad
piazza, now dotted with men and women, and her eyes widened in
amazeme