Dropping all the well-turned phrases which he had been trying to frame, he said simply that he had come there two years before with the conceit of a young man expecting to teach them a good deal, and that he went away feeling that he had taught very little, but that he had learned a great deal; he had learned that the kindest people in the world lived in that region; he should never forget their kindness and should always feel that his best friends were there.  A few words more about his hopes for the school and his feeling for the people who had been so good to him, and he pronounced the school closed.  To his surprise, at a wink from Squire Rawson, one of the other trustees, who had formerly been opposed to Keith, rose, and, addressing the assemblage, began to say things about him that pleased him as much as they astonished him.

He said that they, too, had begun with some doubt as to how things would work, as one “could never tell what a colt would do till he got the harness on him,” but this colt had “turned out to be a pretty good horse.”  Mr. Keith, maybe, had taught more than he knew.  He had taught some folks—­this with a cut of his eye over toward where Jake Dennison sat big and brown in the placid content of a young giant, fanning Euphronia for life—­he had “taught some folks that a door had to be right strong to keep out a teacher as knowed his business.”  Anyhow, they were satisfied with him, and the trustees had voted to employ him another year, but he had declined.  He had “business” that would take him away.  Some thought they knew that business. (At this there was a responsive titter throughout the major portion of the room, and Gordon Keith was furious with himself for finding that he suddenly turned hot and red.) He himself, the speaker said, didn’t pretend to know anything about it, but he wanted to say that if Mr. Keith didn’t find the business as profitable as he expected, the trustees had determined to hold the place open for him for one year, and had elected a successor temporarily to hold it in case he should want to come back.

At this there was a round of approval, as near general applause as that stolid folk ever indulged in.

Keith spent the next day in taking leave of his friends.

His last visit that evening was to Dr. Balsam.  He had not been to the village often in the evening since Mrs. Yorke and her daughter had left the place.  Now, as he passed up the walk, the summer moonlight was falling full on the white front of the little hotel.  The slanting moonlight fell on the corner of the verandah where he had talked so often to Alice Yorke as she lay reclining on her lounge, and where he had had that last conversation with Mrs. Yorke, and Keith saw a young man leaning over some one enveloped in white, half reclining in an arm-chair.  He wondered if the same talk were going on that had gone on there before that evening when Mrs. Yorke had made him look nakedly at Life.