Part 30 (2/2)
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 amazement.
”Why, there's Mr. Morrow!”
”Who's he?” queried Harold indifferently.
”Chris Morrow's father--don't you know? The one that gave me the pansy pin.”
”Oh! Where is he?”
”Over there by the post, right next to the girl in light pink.”
”That's the man I came up with! But his name isn't Morrow--it's Wins.h.i.+p. He said so.”
”Well, it looks just like him anyway,” insisted Polly. ”Perhaps it isn't,” she added disappointedly.
Before they reached the piazza steps, the stranger arose and went inside.
”It doesn't walk like Mr. Morrow,” admitted Polly. ”But I wish he'd stayed, I wanted to see him nearer.”
For several days, however, no opportunity came for observing the man at close range. In the big dining-hall, even if he chanced to be there at the same time, he sat the entire length of the room away from her, and they did not meet elsewhere. Then, one morning, at a turn of the long piazza, they chanced to come face to face, and Polly, struck by his remarkable resemblance to the father of her friend, could not forbear to speak.
”I beg your pardon,” she began, half afraid now that she had actually started, ”but aren't you Mr. Morrow,--the one I used to see at the hospital in Fair Harbor?”
A puzzled look swept the man's face. Then he smiled.
”I think you are mistaken, little lady. My name is Wins.h.i.+p, Bradford Wins.h.i.+p of New York.”
”You look almost exactly like him,” returned Polly, even now refusing to be quite convinced, although there was not a trace of recognition in the smiling face she was scanning.
”I seem to have two or three doubles around the country,” he remarked.
”I am continually being taken for somebody or other. Sorry not to have had the previous pleasure of your acquaintance, but I hope that we may follow up the little we have made.”
He left her with a deferential bow, and she ran to tell Patricia and Ilga of her blunder. How Harold would have laughed! But he had left for home as soon as it had been ascertained that the trains were running on time.
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