"Oh," said Mrs. Forest. "I shall be very glad indeed to make the acquaintance of any relative of Mr. Huntington's--and you didn't tell me that before, Peggy--"
"I didn't think of it before," admitted truthful Peggy.
Mrs. Forest sailed into the room, very impressive and rustling in her afternoon silks, and greeted the young student with unusual cordiality.
"I don't see anything so clammy about her," he thought to himself; she almost seemed to retain his hand in extra friendliness, as if he were some favorite nephew.
"Well, well," she was saying, "there is a resemblance, too, now I look at you. Yes, I think I should have known you anywhere. You have a relative to be proud of in Mr. Huntington," she continued, "you are a relative of his, I believe?"
Peggy clapped her hand over her mouth to choke back the exclamation of dismay that rose from her heart, and two slow tears of mortification gathered in Katherine's gentle eyes and rolled brightly down her cheeks at the awful precipitation of events Mrs. Forest had caused.
But the boy was answering and the girls could hardly believe their ears as they heard him say "Huntington? Why, no, I am afraid you have confused me with someone else. I am not sure that I have ever heard the name. I am not related to any one owning it, in any case."
Oh, tumbling air castles! oh, crashing dreams of happy endings! oh, sick and weak and trembling disappointment, and blank, meaningless future!
Peggy clasped her hands in her lap and leaned forward and stared at the boy with saddest reproach. He had certainly led them to believe he was the missing Huntington heir; he had been on their campus when the rose-tree fell, he had admitted playing the mandolin, he had an initial H., all just as the fortune teller had said, and yet he was no more Mr. Huntington's grandson than she was!
The tears were falling so rapidly now on Katharine's cheeks that she could no longer keep from being generally observed. She sprang up, and with her handkerchief to her eyes groped her way from the room, and they heard her a moment later stumbling up the stairs.
Jim looked in bewilderment to the door through which she had gone and then back to the stricken Peggy with an expression of "What have I done?" for he thought surely the girls must have given some impression of him to their principal for a reason of their own and now he had ruthlessly destroyed the fabric of their tale.