The morning they all started back to the city was a memorable one. Graham had insisted that Shirley ask for a holiday until Tuesday morning so that she might go up with them in the car, and have the whole day to be at home and help her mother get settled. She had consented, and found to her surprise that Mr. Barnard was most kind about it. He had even added that he intended to raise her salary, and she might consider that hereafter she was to have ten dollars more per month for her services, which they valued very highly.
George had sent his resignation to the store and was not to go back at all. Graham had arranged that, for school began the day after his return and he would need to be free at once.
Elizabeth, to her great delight, was to go with the Hollisters and remain a few days until her parents returned. Mrs. Graham had written from the West making a proposition to Mrs. Hollister that Carol be allowed to go to school with Elizabeth the next winter, because Mrs. Graham felt it would be so good for Elizabeth to have a friend like that. Mrs. Hollister, however, answered that she felt it better for her little girl to remain with her mother a little longer; and that she did not feel it would be a good thing for her child, who would be likely to have a simple life before her with very few luxuries, to go to a fashionable finishing-school where the standards must all necessarily be so different from those of her own station in life, and, kind as the offer had been, she must decline it. She did not say that Carol had fairly bristled at the idea of leaving her beloved high school now when she was a senior and only one year before her graduation. That bit of horror and hysterics on Carol's part had been carefully suppressed within the four walls of her mother's room; but Elizabeth, deeply disappointed, had wept her heart out over the matter, and finally been comforted by the promise that Mrs. Hollister would write and ask Mrs. Graham to allow Elizabeth to go to school with Carol the coming winter. That proposition was now on its way West, together with an announcement of Sidney's engagement to Shirley. Sidney was confidently expecting congratulatory telegrams that morning when he reached the city. He had written his father in detail all about their plans for returning, and how the work at the old barn was progressing, and Mr. Graham, Senior, was too good a manager not to plan to greet the occasion properly. Therefore Graham stopped at his office for a few minutes before taking the family out to Glenside, and, sure enough, came down with his hands full of letters and telegrams, and one long white envelope which he put carefully in his breast pocket. They had a great time reading the telegrams and letters.