Then Mildred got out her violin, and after the proper tuning of the strings, she placed it under her shapely chin.  She played without music some of the simple heart melodies, and then some of the Sunday School songs which the company softly accompanied by words.

Carlia poked the log in the grate into a blaze, then slyly turned the lamp wick down.  When detected and asked why she did that she replied: 

“I wanted to make it appear more like a picnic party around a camp fire in the hills.”

CHAPTER FIVE.

Dorian’s high school days in the city began that fall, a little late because he had so many things to set right at home; but he soon made up the lost time, for he was a student not afraid of hard work.  He walked back and forth the three miles.  Mrs. Brown offered him a room at her large city residence, but he could not accept it because of his daily home chores.  However, he occasionally called on the Brown’s who tried to make him feel as much at home as they did at Greenstreet.

Never before were days so perfect to Dorian, never before had he so enjoyed the fleeting hours.  For the first week or two, he was a little shy, but the meeting each morning with boys and girls of his own age and mingling with them in their studies and their recreations, soon taught him that they were all very much alike, just happy, carefree young people, most of them trying to get an education.  He soon learned, also, that he could easily hold his own in the class work with the brightest of them.  The teachers, and students also, soon learned to know this.  Boys came to him for help in problems, and the younger girls chattered about him with laughing eyes and tossing curls.  What a wonder it was!  He the simple, plainly-dressed country boy, big and awkward and ugly as he thought himself to be, becoming a person of some importance.  And so the days went all too swiftly by.  Contrary to his younger boyhood’s experience, the closing hour came too soon, when it was time to go home to mother and chores and lessons.

And the mother shared the boy’s happiness, for she could see the added joy of living and working which had come into his life by the added opportunities and new environment.  He frequently discussed with his mother his lessons.  She was not well posted in the knowledge derived from books, and sometimes she mildly resented this newer learning which he brought into the home and seemed to intrude on her old-established ideas.  For instance, when the cold winter nights came, and Dorian kept open his bedroom window, the mother protested that he would “catch his death of cold.”  Night air and drafts are very dangerous, especially if let into one’s bedroom, she held.