Then, walking on and keeping step with her companion, suddenly a new world seemed to have spread itself before her eyes. Shyly she stole a glance at her tall companion, and then laid her hand coaxingly on his coat sleeve.
“Will you please stop a minute. I want to explain something to you,” she asked. Polly’s expression was intensely serious; she had never been more in earnest; all the color seemed to have gone from her face so as to leave her eyes the more deeply blue.
“You see, Mr. Hunt, I never, never intend marrying any one. I mean to devote all my life to my profession and I have never thought of anything else since I was a little girl.”
Gravely Richard Hunt nodded. Not for an instant did his face betray any doubt of Polly’s decision in regard to her future. Then Polly laughed and her eyes changed from their former seriousness to a look of the gayest and most charmingcamaraderie. “Still, Mr. Hunt, if you really did mean what you said just now, why I don’t believe I shall mind if we do speak of it some day again. Of course I am not in love with you, but——”
Richard Hunt slipped the girl’s arm inside his. There was something in his face that gave Polly a sense of strength and quiet such as she had never felt in all her restless, ambitious girlhood.
“Yes, I understand,” he answered. “But look there, Polly, isn’t that Sunrise Hill over there and your beloved little cabin in the distance? And aren’t we glad to be alive in this wonderful world?”
The girl’s voice was like a song. “I never knew what it meant to be really alive until this minute,” she whispered.
The sixth volume of the Camp Fire Girls Series will be known as “The Camp Fire Girls in After Years.” In this story the girls will appear as wives and mothers. Also it will reveal the fact that romance does not end with marriage, and that in many cases a woman’s life story is only beginning upon her wedding day. There willbe new characters, a new plot and new love interests as well, but in the main the theme will follow the fortunes of the same group of girls who years ago formed a Camp Fire club and lived, worked and loved under the shadow of Sunrise Hill.