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In her earnestness she placed her hand on his wrist. Marsh stood for a moment, looking down at it. In the fading light it might have been a little pale leaf blown by the wind against the hard, brown forearm.
“All right,” he said at last, in rather a queer tone. “I promise.”
“What’s been the trouble, Rodney?”
Holmes was at the gate, and from the other direction Mrs. Holmes and Waring were approaching. Ann slipped away to join them, while “the boss” interviewed his head-shepherd. But she gave no opportunity to Gerald Waring for any further attempt at flirtation. She reached her room, and was able to change her frock without its deplorable condition having been noticed. And pinned on her dressing-table she found a very badly scrawled note.
“Dear Miss Merril,” she read:
“I have draun 2 hearts. 1 is yours, and 1 is mine. on mine is repintence and on yours is forgiveness. that is to show I repint. Dad has tole me how to spell the long words, but I did not tell him what fore. plese forgive your loving friend Biddy.
“P.S.—I do not feel to well to-night praps it is to many chocolates I wish I had let Connie and Alice eat some if I am sick in the night I hop I wone disturb you.”
Ann laughed as she read it, but she was, nevertheless, very touched. The little girls were beginning to mean a great deal in her life, and somehow the feeling invoked by that funny scrawl, and the drawing of the two lopsided hearts, had the effect for the