Five Little Peppers Grown Up | Page 8

gave an inaudible reply, and Polly ran off, carrying a face on
which the sunshine struggled to get back to its accustomed place.
"Beg pardon for troubling you," said a tall young man, getting off from
the divan to meet her, as she hurried into the reception room, "but you
were good enough to say that I might talk with you about my sister, and
really I am very much at sea to know what to do with her, Miss
Pepper."
It was a long speech, and at the end of it, Polly and the caller were
seated, she in a big chair, and he back on the divan opposite to her.
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Loughead," said Polly brightly, "and I hope I
can help you, for I am very fond of Amy."
"It's good of you to say so," said Jack Loughead, "for she's a trying
little minx enough, I suspect; and Miss Salisbury tells me you've had no
end of trouble with her."
"Miss Salisbury shouldn't say that," cried Polly involuntarily. Then she

stopped with a blush. "I mean, I don't think she quite understands it.
Amy does really try hard to study."
"Oh!" said Jack Loughead. Then he tapped his boot with his
walking-stick.
"So you really think my sister will amount to something, Miss Pepper?"
He looked at her keenly.
Polly started. "Oh, yes, indeed! Why, she must, Mr. Loughead."
He laughed, and bit his moustache.
"And really, I don't think that Amy is quite understood," said Polly
warmly, and forgetting herself; "if people believe in her, it makes her
want to do things to please them."
"She says herself she has bothered you dreadfully," said Jack, with a
vicious thrust of the walking-stick at his boot.
"She has a little," confessed Polly, "but not dreadfully. And I do think,
Mr. Loughead, now that you have come, and that she sees how much
you want her to study and practice, she will really do better. I do,
indeed," said Polly earnestly.
Outside she could hear the "two boys," as she still called them, and
Grandpapa's voice in animated consultation over the ways and means,
she knew as well as if she were there, of spending the holidays, and it
seemed as if she could never sit in the reception room another moment
longer, but that she must fly out to them.
[Illustration: "OH!" SAID JACK LOUGHEAD. THEN HE TAPPED
HIS BOOT WITH HIS WALKING STICK.]
"Amy has no mother," said Jack Loughead after a moment, and he
turned away his head, and pretended to look out of the window.
"I know it." Polly's heart leaped guiltily. Oh! how could she think of
holidays and good times, while this poor little girl, but fifteen, had only

a dreary sense of boarding-school life to mean home to her. "And oh! I
do think," Polly hastened to say, and she clasped her hands as Phronsie
would have done, "it has made all the difference in the world to her.
And she does just lovely--so much better, I mean, than other girls
would in her place. I do really, Mr. Loughead," repeated Polly.
"And no sister," added Jack, as if to himself. "How is a fellow like
me--why, I am twenty-five, Miss Pepper, and I've been knocking about
the world ever since I was her age; my uncle took me then to Australia,
into his business--how am I ever to 'understand,' as you call it, that
girl?"
It was impossible not to see his distress, and Polly, with a deaf ear to
the chatter out in the library, now bent all her energies to helping him.
"Mr. Loughead," she said, and the color deserted her round cheek, and
she leaned forward from the depths of the big chair, "I am afraid you
won't like what I am going to say."
"Go on, please," said Jack, his eyes on her face.
"I think if you want to understand Amy," said Polly, holding her hands
very tightly together, to keep her courage up, "you must love her first."
"Hey? I don't understand," said Jack, quite bewildered.
"You must love her, and believe she's going to do nice things, and be
proud of her," went on Polly steadily.
"How can I? She's such a little beggar," exclaimed Jack, "won't study,
and all that."
"And you must make her the very best friend you have in all this world,
and let her see that you are glad that she is your sister, and tell her
things, and never, never scold." Then Polly stopped, and the color flew
up to the waves of brown hair on her brow.
"I wish you'd go on," said Jack Loughead, as she paused.

"Oh! I've said enough," said Polly, with a gasp, and beginning to wish
she could