Part 34

“Don't worry, Edward. I can manage him,” said Sally.

But she was mistaken. The very next day Jim proposed in due form to little Lucy. He could not help it. It was during the morning intermission, and he came upon her seated all alone under a hawthorn hedge, studying her arithmetic anxiously. She was in blue, as usual, and a very perky blue bow sat on her soft, dark hair, like a bluebird. She glanced up at Jim from under her long lashes.

“Do two and seven make eight or ten? If you please, will you tell me?” said she.

“Say, Lucy,” said Jim, “will you marry me by and by?”

Lucy stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Marry me by and by?”

Lucy took refuge in her little harbor of ignorance. “I don't know,” said she.

“But you like me, don't you, Lucy?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't you like me better than you like Johnny Trumbull?”

“I don't know.”

“You like me better than you like Arnold Carruth, don't you? He has curls and wears socks.”

“I don't know.”

“When do you think you can be sure?”

“I don't know.”

Jim stared helplessly at little Lucy. She stared back sweetly.

“Please tell me whether two and seven make six or eleven, Jim,” said she.

“They make nine,” said Jim.

“I have been counting my fingers and I got it eleven, but I suppose I must have counted one finger twice,” said little Lucy. She gazed reflectively at her little baby-hands. A tiny ring with a blue stone shone on one finger.

“I will give you a ring, you know,” Jim said, coaxingly.

“I have got a ring my father gave me. Did you say it was ten, please, Jim?”

“Nine,” gasped Jim.

“All the way I can remember,” said little Lucy, “is for you to pick just so many leaves off the hedge, and I will tie them in my handkerchief, and just before I have to say my lesson I will count those leaves.”

Jim obediently picked nine leaves from the hawthorn hedge, and little Lucy tied them into her handkerchief, and then the Japanese gong sounded and they went back to school.

That night after dinner, just before Lucy went to bed, she spoke of her own accord to her father and Miss Martha, a thing which she seldom did. “Jim Patterson asked me to marry him when I asked him what seven and two made in my arithmetic lesson,” said she. She looked with the loveliest round eyes of innocence first at her father, then at Miss Martha. Cyril Rose gasped and laid down his newspaper.

“What did you say, little Lucy?” he asked.