Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/40

 "When shall you be President?" corrected the boy, looking across at his sister with that same old-mannish expression which was a part of all he said and did.

Hampstead cuddled the girl closer, and his eye abandoned the page to look down the bridge of his nose into distance.

"Why?" he asked presently.

"Oh, because," said Tayna, with a little shiver of eagerness, "I can hardly wait."

Hampstead's eyes wandered to his motto on the wall. The eyes of the boy followed and spelled out the letters wonderingly, but in silence.

"We must be able to wait," said John, squeezing Tayna again. "It's a long, long way; but if we just keep on keeping on, why, after a while we are there, you know."

Tayna sighed and reached up a round, plump arm till it encircled Hampstead's neck, as she asked, still more shyly:

"And when you are President, every one will know just how good and great you are, and they won't call you awkward nor—nor homely any more, will they?"

A flush and a chuckle marked John's reception of this query, after which he observed hastily and a bit apprehensively:

"Say, you wet little goldfishes! Remember that you are never, never, now or any time, howsoever odd I bear myself, to breathe a word to anybody, not to a single soul, not to your mamma or your papa or your Sunday-school teacher or anybody, of all these nice little play secrets which we have between ourselves."

An instant seriousness came over the children's faces.

"Cross my heart," murmured Tayna, with a twitch of her slender finger across her breast.

"And hope to die," added Dick, with a funeral solem-