At the conclusion of the song the first thing Little Bel heard was Dalgetty’s piping voice behind her,—­

“And guineas it is, Miss McDonald.  Ye’ve won it fair an’ square.  Guineas it is!”

“Eh, what?  Guineas!  What is ’t ye’re sayin’?” asked Sandy Bruce; his eyes, steady glowing like coals, gazing at Little Bel.

“The supplement, sir,” answered Little Bel, lifting her eyes roguishly to his.  “Mr. Dalgetty thought I was too young for the school, an’ he’d promise me no supplement till he saw if I’d be equal to ’t.”

This was the sly Bel’s little revenge on Dalgetty, who began confusedly to explain that it was not he any more than the other trustees, and he only wished that they had all been here to see, as he had seen, how finely the school had been managed; but nobody heard what he said, for above all the humming and buzzing and laughing there came up from the centre of the school-room a reiterated call of “Sirs!” “Trustees!” “Mr. Trustee!” “Board!”

It was Archie McLeod, standing up on the backs of two seats, waving a white paper, and trying frantically to make himself heard.  The face of a man galloping for life and death, coming up at the last second with a reprieve for one about to be shot, could hardly be fuller of intense anxiety than was Archie’s as he waved his paper and shouted.

Little Bel gazed bewilderingly at him.  This was not down on her programme of the exercises.  What could it be?

As soon as partial silence enabled him to speak, Archie proceeded to read a petition, setting forth, to the respected Board of Trustees, that the undersigned, boys and girls of the Wissan Bridge School, did hereby unanimously request that they might have no other teacher than Miss McDonald, “as long as she lives.”

This last clause had been the cause of bitter disputing between Archie and Sandy,—­Sandy insisting upon having it in; Archie insisting that it was absurd, because they would not go to school as long as Miss McDonald lived.  “But there’s the little ones and the babies that’ll be growin’ up,” retorted Sandy, “an’ there’ll never be another like her:  I say, ’as long as she lives’”; and “as long as she lives” it was.  And when Archie, with an unnecessary emphasis, delivered this closing clause of the petition, it was received with a roar of laughter from the platform, which made him flush angrily, and say, with a vicious punch in Sandy’s ribs:  “There, I told ye, it spoiled it a’.  They’re fit to die over it; an’ sma’ blame to ’em, ye silly!”

But he was reassured when he heard Sandy Bruce’s voice overtopping the tumult with:  “A vary sensible request, my lad; an’ I, for one, am o’ yer way o’ thinkin’.”

In which speech was a deeper significance than anybody at the time dreamed.  In that hurly-burly and hilarious confusion no one had time to weigh words or note meanings; but there were some who recalled it a few months later when they were bidden to a wedding at the house of John McDonald,—­a wedding at which Sandy Bruce was groom, and Little Bel the brightest, most winsome of brides.