Page:Pollyanna Grows Up.djvu/271

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The Game and Pollyanna
245


himself went to Boston; and then of course she did not see him at all.

Pollyanna was surprised then to see how much she missed him. Even to know that he was in town, and that there was a chance that he might come over, was better than the dreary emptiness of certain absence; and even his puzzling moods of alternating gloominess and gayety were preferable to this utter silence of nothingness. Then, one day, suddenly she pulled herself up with hot cheeks and shamed eyes.

"Well, Pollyanna Whittier," she upbraided herself sharply, "one would think you were in love with Jimmy Bean Pendleton! Can't you think of anything but him?"

Whereupon, forthwith, she bestirred herself to be very gay and lively indeed, and to put this Jimmy Bean Pendleton out of her thoughts. As it happened, Aunt Polly, though unwittingly, helped her to this.

With the going of the Carews had gone also their chief source of immediate income, and Aunt Polly was beginning to worry again, audibly, about the state of their finances.

"I don't know, really, Pollyanna, what is going to become of us," she would moan frequently. "Of course we are a little ahead now from this summer's work, and we have a small sum from the estate right along; but I never know how soon that's going to stop, like all the rest. If only we could do something to bring in some ready cash!"

It was after one of these moaning lamentations one day that Pollyanna's eyes chanced to fall on a prize-