"What's going on inside this red pate? You look as solemn as an ostracized owl."
"I'm trying to think how it is going to seem without Peggy this winter and I don't like the picture even a little bit," and Polly wagged the "red pate" dubiously.
"Better make up your mind to come along with your running-mate. By Jove, that's a brain throb, Peggy! How about it? Can't you persuade this girl of ours to give up the co-ed plan back yonder in Annapolis,--she knows all the seamanship and nav. that's good for her already,--and you'll need a room-mate up here at Columbia Heights School if we settle upon it," and Captain Stewart looked at Polly half longingly, half teasingly. Polly had grown very dear to the bluff, sincere man during her companionship with Peggy, and had crept into a corner of his heart he had never felt it possible for anyone but Peggy herself to fill. Somehow, latterly when thinking and planning for Peggy's well-being or pleasure, visions of Polly's tawny head invariably rose before him, and Polly's happy, sunny face was always beside the one he loved best of all. The two young girls had become inseparable in his thoughts as well as in reality.
"Oh, Polly, will you? Will you?" begged Peggy, instantly fired with the wildest desire to have Polly enter the school which it had been decided she should enter if at closer inspection it proved to be all the catalogues, letters and dozens of pamphlets sent to Mrs. Harold represented it to be.
"If I go to the Columbia Heights School what will Ralph say? And all the others, too? They'll say I've backed down on my co-ed plan and will run me half to death. Besides, Ralph needs me right there to let him know I'm keeping a lookout."
"He doesn't need you half as much as this girl of mine needs you. You just let Ralph do a little navigating for himself and learn that it's up to him to make good on his own account. He's man enough to; all he needs now is to find it out. Will you let him do so by coming down here with Peggy?"
As Captain Stewart asked the question which ended the last chapter the W. B. & A. electric car came to a standstill in the heart of Washington and as he assisted his charges to descend the steps, Polly was the last. As she placed her hand in his she looked straight into his kind eyes and said: