"Parsons Court," said the old man, smiling down on her curiously, and then laughing toward his grandson who laughed back appreciatively.
"Parsons--?" her breath came in a little astonished gasp.
"That's it," Mr. Huntington repeated, "and do you know why?"
But Peggy must have been a daring young guesser indeed had she been able to guess correctly why, as the old man's next remark showed.
"It's _yours!_" he told her, pressing a legal looking paper into her hand, "the whole street was built and planned and named for you, and you shall have the rent of these little houses, or you can sell them when you wish. I thought if you just rented them, while you are in college, they'd bring you in a larger income than most of the girls know how to spend."
Peggy threw herself right down on the ground and began sobbing. It was too wonderful--it was simply the wildest magic! Oh, how beautiful it was to have somebody like her so well and want her to be happy! Then as abruptly as she had cast herself down, she sprang up, and laughing and crying at once, she seized Mr. Huntington's hand, and pumped it up and down, and clung to it and tried to talk and could not.
Jim turned his head away before her great joy and smiled quietly all by himself. She was such a flyaway sort of Peggy, tears one minute and laughter the next, and all the past and all the future were as nothing beside the present moment.
He was recalling all that he himself and the old man beside him owed to this same warm-hearted girl, and he felt that the debt was not nearly canceled by Parsons Court.
"Oh, Jim," she was turning to him now, "a few minutes ago I was wicked enough to be almost sorry you saved me from that storm so long ago. But now, oh, Jim, I thank you now all over again for having saved me, so that I can be here now and have this lovely, lovely thing happen to me. How good people are to me! Oh, I must remember to be a regular _angel_ to everybody I meet just to pay up for everybody's always being so wonderful to me. Mr. Huntington, I _love_ Parsons Court, and every house in it, and I'm so stingy I hate to rent any of them, but just want to come and live in them all myself, one after the other. But renting them means college, so please, Mr. Huntington, get me some tenants just as fast as you can,--and I never was so happy in my life, or didn't ever expect to be!"
