e anxiously.

"Certainly not."

"O dear! Then you wouldn't like it, of course. I'm afraid, now, you
won't ever play the game, Aunt Polly."

"Game? What game?"

"Why, that father--" Pollyanna clapped her hand to her lips.
"N-nothing," she stammered. Miss Polly frowned.

"That will do for this morning, Pollyanna," she said tersely. And the
sewing lesson was over.

It was that afternoon that Pollyanna, coming down from her attic room,
met her aunt on the stairway.

"Why, Aunt Polly, how perfectly lovely!" she cried. "You were coming up
to see me! Come right in. I love company," she finished, scampering up
the stairs and throwing her door wide open.

Now Miss Polly had not been intending to call on her niece. She had been
planning to look for a certain white wool shawl in the cedar chest near
the east window. But to her unbounded surprise now, she found herself,
not in the main attic before the cedar chest, but in Pollyanna's little
room sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs--so many, many times
since Pollyanna came, Miss Polly had found herself like this, doing some
utterly unexpected, surprising thing, quite unlike the thing she had set
out to do!

"I love company," said Pollyanna, again, flitting about as if she were
dispensing the hospitality of a palace; "specially since I've had this
room, all mine, you know. Oh, of course, I had a room, always, but 'twas
a hired room, and hired rooms aren't half as nice as owned ones, are
they? And of course I do own this one, don't I?"

"Why, y-yes, Pollyanna," murmured Miss Polly, vaguely wondering why she
did not get up at once and go to look for that shawl.

"And of course NOW I just love this room, even if it hasn't got the
carpets and curtains and pictures that I'd been want--" With a painful
blush Pollyanna stopped short. She was plunging into an entirely
different sentence when her aunt interrupted her sharply.

"What's that, Pollyanna?"

"N-nothing, Aunt Polly, truly. I didn't mean to say it."

"Probably not," returned Miss Polly, coldly; "but you did say it, so
suppose we have the rest of it."

"But it wasn't anything only that I'd been kind of planning on pretty
carpets and lace curtains and things, you know. But, of course--"

"PLANNING on them!" interrupted Miss Polly, sharply.

Pollyanna blushed still more painfully.

"I ought not to have, of course, Aunt Polly," she apologized. "It was
only because I'd always wanted them and hadn't had the